Managing Products in Zen Cart
You really need to get comfortable with managing your product catalog as soon as
possible. I usually create some product categories and add a few products
when I do the install and configuration. This will help get you started.
Here is a link to a video to help get you oriented to
using the Admin for working with products and categories:
After you have watched the video, you will probably recognize these fields as
most relevant to working with products in your shopping cart.
Products Name: Obvious, just give it a simple name.
Tax Class: If you need to assign a tax be sure to identify the tax class
(probably Taxable Goods).
Products Description: Write anything you want to describe the product or
its uses.
Products Quantity: This is how you manage your inventory.
Products Image: Click the Browse button and upload an image. Zen
Cart will size it appropriately automatically. You don't have to use
images.
Sort Order: Assign a number. Smaller numbers are higher on the
list.
Be sure to click the Preview button and then confirm by Updating or Inserting
the product into the catalog.
Product Variability And Product Units
All of the above is very straightforward and will apply to the standard use of
Zen Cart as applies to most commercial products. Now let's consider a
special conceptual challenge in using an online shopping cart for farm products.
This is the Product Variability problem that was discussed in the
Overview page of this resource section.
Some farm products do fit well into the traditional shopping cart structure (such
as a carton of one dozen eggs, a pound package of ground beef or hot dogs).
These products tend to have low variability and a very clear product unit (i.e.,
a standard package or size).
However many other products cannot easily be fit into a single, permanent price
unit for online purchase. In other words, the item ordered online may not
be exactly what the customer will receive on delivery. In the
Overview we
considered two basic approaches for dealing with the product variability problem:
Adjusted Invoice and Incremental Product Listing.
Hopefully by the time you are ready to enter products into the catalog you have
have given this some thought and know which approach you are going to use when
inputing the products.
If you chose the Incremental Product Listing approach you can simply enter
each product increment as a separate product. Each increment defines the
product unit for that quantity of product. Be sure to track the Products
Quantity field to make sure your inventory is accurate. Otherwise you could sell
product that you don't actually have (of course this applies to any approach
you choose).
If you chose the Adjusted Invoice approach, you will probably want to come up with
an average or typical quantity which will represent the Product Unit for each
product. If the average weight for a particular type of steak is 3 pounds,
then that will be the product unit for that product. You could use that in
your Product Name (Three Pound Steak). You would surely want to include
that in your Product Description, noting that this is just a typical or average
weight and that the actual delivered steak could be more or less. You
could show the per pound price and use that figure to calculate the Product
price for that unit (3 pound steak x $5 per pound = $15 Product Price).
This will need to be adjusted when the order is actually filled, but that is an
accounting process which is beyond the present discussion.
There is another way of using the Adjusted Invoice approach based strictly
on weight quantity as the Product Unit. So you sell your steak (or
whatever) by the pound. The product unit is based pounds of product rather
than a typical or average specimen for that product. If you wish, this can
be structured somewhat as Zen Cart does allow you to specify a minimum quantity
and also specific increments. So you could sell your boiler by the pound
with a 4 pound minimum (the minimum weight for that the product) and also
require that the order be place in 4 pound increments (4, 8, 12 pounds, etc).
I don't know of any farms using this approach, but is worth considering early on
in the process since farms are so unique in how they do business and it may work
perfectly for your situation. In theory this approach should make the
Adjusted Invoice process easier and quicker from an accounting standpoint
since you would just need to adjust the weight and and let the program take care
of the rest (i.e., the Product Unit does not change). However, it might be
more confusing to the customer that the selling by a typical product unit.
There is a Zen Cart module that allows you to adjust orders within the Admin,
which may work well for this approach.
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