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| Managing Products | Return Home | ||||||||||||||||||
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Products are the keystone of your online catalog. They are the reason surfers use your site and they provide the foundation for the majority of the search engine placement enjoyed by your site. This section will cover not only how to manage your product listings but also how to make the most use of your product names and descriptions to enhance your position in search engines. Product Definition: We recommend that you read this section carefully before you begin to create your product records. LMS is designed to allow you maximum flexibility in creating products for an easy to use catalog site. This flexibility requires a certain amount of complexity. We recommend that you read this section carefully before you begin to create your products. LMS divides every product into two, distinct sections. The first section we call the catalog Product Parent record. The second section we call the catalog product attributes or Product Child record. The product description contains the basic information about a product, it's description, how it relates to other products and defines up to 4 custom attributes that make the product unique. The product attribute (child) record defines the unique attributes or properties of a specific property. The parent record is in effect a "Product Definition" that groups like products. The following table illustrates some of the values within each type of record.
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The following shows how a real set of products would be defined.
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As this illustrates, you have two (or more) individual products (unique stock codes). One is a large white oxford shirt and the other is an extra large white oxford shirt. Each has a different price and inventory quantity. If all of these products were displayed in your catalog individually your user would have to scroll through dozens of products to find the one they want. The picture and description for all of the products would be exactly the same. Only the details, pricing and availability would be different. LMS uses the Product Parent to group all of these products into a single product description and lets the user choose the exact product from a list. The following illustrations shows how the product might look to the shopper.
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of product with
dropdown using one attribute, size.
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Image
of product with
dropdown open using one attribute, size.
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| Creating
Parent Product Records: Creating Child Product Records:
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