Products

• Add Vendors – Convenient way of organizing supplier information. Vendors must be added before adding products so that purchase orders will generate properly. Every product must have a vendor assigned. Add yourself as the first vendor. All products not assigned to a vendor for drop shipping must be assigned to you. See the video at the bottom of this page on how to set up drop shipping.
  • Add Vendors
    • Select the Vendors tab.
    • Enter the vendor’s name in the box at the top of the page
    • Add vendor details and press Update. Under Cart Associations, associate the vendor with one or more shopping carts and press Update.
    • The payment terms field is used to tell the vendor the terms on your POs. If the field is empty, the PO will tell the vendor to charge your credit card on file when they ship an order. If the field is set to zero, the PO tells the vendor that they will be paid by check twice a month.
    • Under Emails, you can add separate email addresses for technical questions (for FAQ list) and for purchase orders. You must add at least one email address for product questions (QA in the drop down list) even if you are not drop-shipping.
    • Attach files including price sheets, manuals and brochures – COMING SOON.
• Manage Vendors – Each vendor has their own administration portal to view open orders and see their account online plus a sales report,
  • Select the Vendors tab and find the vendor you want to manage.
  • Under the General Notes box, select View Open POs
  • Select Admin Home. This is the vendor’s main administration page.
  • Copy the URL at the top of the page and send it to the vendor. They can access this through a link in their emailed POs as well.
  • Under View and manage POs you can see if a vendor is falling behind.
  • Your account – payments and purchases shows a running account list.
  • Sales Report tells the vendor how much of which products your store is selling.
• Add New Products
  • Add individual products
    • From the Products tab, select Add New Products
    • Add your item number and the vendor item number (can be the same)
    • Select the product type (services and downloads are also classified as products)
    • Under Product Description, enter the name of the product
    • Enter a short description. This is an HTML field – no images in this box.
    • Enter price information
      • Price is the price the retail customer will pay if they order online.
      • Shipping price will be charged to the customer at checkout. This price is per item.
      • Our shipping cost is the estimated cost we must pay the vendor for shipping if drop shipping.
      • If ‘drop ship’ is selected, a purchase order will automatically be emailed to the corresponding vendor.
    • Set up product as a Subscription with recurring billing
      • Select monthly or annual from the  Subscription period drop down list.
      • Customer will be billed on the same day of the month as the initial purchase (eg. every month on the 14th).
    • Enter initial inventory quantity
      • If the inventory field is empty, no inventory information will be displayed.
      • If zero, the shopping cart will display “This product is backordered”.
      • If the inventory number is above zero, the product page will say “In stock and ready to ship”.
      • If there is inventory and the item is purchased, the quantity will decrease by the quantity ordered.
      • It is generally recommended that you leave the inventory field empty if the product will be drop shipped.
    • Enter all additional information
    • Add pictures to Product Long Description using WordPress media manager
      • Upload the photo to the Media Library.
      • Copy the image URL into the Long Description
    • Select Add Product
    • Adding Pictures – After the product is added, Browse and Upload a photo. The shopping cart will automatically size your image for a thumbnail, medium and full size image. Upload the largest version of the image that you have. If you do not upload a photo, the shopping cart will display a default image for the thumbnail and product page images that says ‘No image available’. If you want to use a different default image, load the images you want to use instead into your Media Library. (If you want nothing to display for these images, you can create a small transparent .gif) Then go to Settings, Storefront Settings and scroll down to the main image set-up area. Enter the URL of the images in the fields for product thumbnail image default URL and product page image default URL.
    • Select a vendor from the drop down list
    • Select Drop Ship yes or no
    • Select Update
  • Add the product to a category
    • At the top of the page select ‘Click here to view and edit category and feature information for this product’
    • Next to categories this product belongs to, select add
    • Find the category in the list and select add
  • Create Feature Groups – Feature Groups allow you to create features and options for your products. For example, Color (black, gold, red, green) or Size (S, M, L, XL), are common feature groups. They can be either required or optional. Optional feature groups are used to up-sell.
    • From the Product tab select Manage Product Feature Groups
    • Put the name of your group in the box Add New Feature Group.
    • Select required if this is a required feature like color or size.
    • Select Add
  • Add features and options to products
    • Go to the product detail page using search or View Products by Categories
    • At the top of the page select ‘Click here to view and edit category and feature information for this product’
    • Next to other products that are features of this product, select Add
    • In the product search field, type in the name of your product ex. Green. If Green is not already a product, follow the instructions above to add it as a product. Every feature must be added as a product first. Select ‘feature only’ on the product detail page to signify that this is a feature of another product only and no one can order the product Green by itself.
    • Once your search finds Green, select add as feature.
    • You can override the price if the feature for your product has a cost to it for this particular item. Fill in feature price and cost and uncheck use product price of.
    • Select the feature group drop down menu and select the feature group you want to display the feature in. Green would go into the Color feature group. If you also add red and blue to this item, they will also be added to the Color feature group and display as a group to the customer. The customer can only select one choice per feature group.
    • Repeat this process for additional feature groups like size
    • If the feature is not added to a feature group, it will display as an Option on the product page.
  • Copying products. If you are entering a group of products that all have the same features you can enter the first product and add all features and categories. Then copy the product (top right on the product detail page). Change the Item Number, the Name and the Price if different and save the new product. Upload the new image next. The product will be in the same category as the first product with all the same features. For example, adding a list of T-Shirt designs that all come in S, M, L and Red, Yellow or Blue.
  • Adding Extended Image/Description Links using WordPress media manager – this function creates a list of links to additional pages. Use it to attach pages to the product such as installation instructions, MSDS sheets, technical drawings, color charts and .pdf brochures.
    • In WordPress go to Media, Add New. Upload the file. Copy the file URL.
    • Enter a description for the link (i.e. Installation Instructions)
    • In the link text box, paste the file relative URL. Click Add
  • Import products from a spreadsheet – If you have a large number of products to add at once, you will want to import from a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet must be formatted correctly  for the import to work smoothly. Duplicate product id’s are not allowed.  
    • From the Features tab, select Upload Products.
    • Prepare up to 10 .CSV files, not to exceed 50 MB total.
    • Drop Ship and Ships Free should have the numeral ’1′ in the column for YES.
    • Product type column – should contain the number for the product type based on this list.
      1. Physical product
      2. Intangible product
      3. Service
      4. Billable time code
      5. Event Registration
    • Categories must be created first to generate the category IDs.
    • Vendors must be entered first to generate the vendor ID’s.
    • After you upload the files, click on the 5th bullet point on the page to see the uploaded product files status.
    • Select your file name.
    • Under Action, click the X to delete the column headers row from your spreadsheet.
    • Click on the file name drop down lists to map the columns.  After you have the column names mapped, select ‘update’ under Action.
    • Click on the link to import the products into the store now.
    • Refresh the page after a few minutes until you see the date data loaded into store.
    • Please note that in many cases complex shopping cart data cannot be automatically loaded. If you have a case where you need to upload a large number of SKUs and categories with product images, please send email to support@orderstorm.com and we will set up custom scripts for your particular case. We charge by the hour for this service.
• Use the Color Selector Tool – The color selector tool is used to view how a product will look in a certain color or color combination prior to purchase.
  • Every color that you offer must be entered as an individual product and marked as a ‘feature only’.
  • On the Product Detail Page for the color ex. Red, enter the color code in the ‘color hexadecimal’ field.
  • Right below the ‘color hexadecimal’ field is the ‘HTML drawing’ dropdown box and a link ‘manage drawings’.
  • Click the ‘manage drawings’ link and add the name and HTML code for the shapes that you want customers to pick colors for.Note: This is an advanced feature. It requires an HTML5 Canvas developer to create the shapes. You must create your HTML drawings using the matching Feature Group ID for the feature groups, Color 1, Color 2, etc. First go to the Product Features page to set up your color feature groups to generate the Feature Group IDs to use in the HTML.Example 1: this.context.fillStyle = (typeof this.colors[136] === ‘undefined’) ? ‘#FFF’ : this.colors[136];
    In this example, 136 is the Feature Group ID for Color 1.

    Feel free to contact us for support with this feature.

  • Once your drawings are added, they will appear in the ‘HTML drawing’ dropdown list. This list is available for all products in your product catalog.
  • Next, go to the product that offers a choice of colors. Select the drawing from the list that matches the shape of the product to add the color selector to the product.Example 2: If a polka-dot blouse comes in a choice of red, pink, lavender, purple and white, set up two feature groups to use: Color 1 for the background and Color 2 for the dots. You will add the actual colors to both the Color 1 and Color 2 feature groups for the the polka-dot blouse product using the same instructions above for adding color options to a product.
• Update Products
  • Individually – all information can be updated on the product detail page
  • Batch Price Update – Price updates can be done by category or by vendor
    • Batch update by Category – find the category you want to update using the steps above for managing categories. Select batch edit products to edit prices for all products in the category and a short list of product attributes
    • Batch Update by Vendor – From the Customer Service Menu select Manage Vendors. At the right, select Batch Edit Products.
  • Price Update – Import from spreadsheet. If you have a large number of products to update at once, you will want to import price changes from a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet must be formatted correctly including unique product id for the import to work smoothly. Duplicate product ids are not allowed.  Send email to support@orderstorm.com for help.
  • Edit FAQ list – Questions and answers can all be edited for grammar, spelling and accuracy. They can also be deleted entirely.
    • After you have logged in to OrderStorm, go to the product you would like to edit.
    • Under Add/Update Product, select ‘Click here to see Q&A for this product’.

Go to WordPress eCommerce User Manual Table of Contents