A product is what you sell: its name, price and pictures. A part is what you buy and count in Inventory. Selling a product takes its parts out of stock, so the register, the online store and wholesale all sell from the same shelves.
Adding a product
- Open Products and choose Add product.
- Give it a name, a Price, a brand and a category, and a picture.
- If it once sold for more, set Price it was; it shows crossed out beside the price.
- Leave Charge tax on unless it is exempt.
- Under What It Is Made Of, choose the part that leaves stock each time one is sold. A kit or a gift set takes several parts; something with no parts is never counted and never shows as out of stock.
- Under Where It Is Sold, switch on On the register to ring it up at checkout, and On the website to show it in your store (once it has a picture).
- Save it.
From a part in Inventory, Make a product of it does the same in one step.
Sizes, scents and colors: variants
If a product comes in sizes, colors, fragrances or flavors, name each option (Size, Scent) and list what it comes in. Each combination is its own variant, with its own price, SKU and part; untick one you do not sell. Leave the options empty to sell it one way, or sell each size as a product of its own.
The product's page and sales
Open a product and choose Page and Sales for what it has done: units sold by month, net sales and gross profit, its rank among products, who sells it, where it is on hand, the customers who bought it, and what is often bought with it. Add a description, how to use it and its ingredients for its page in your store, and pick products that Pairs Well With it.
Collections
A collection is a set of products shown and sold together: best sellers, gift sets, everything from one brand.
- Open Collections and add one.
- Under How it is filled, pick the products by hand, or let it fill itself: products whose brand, category or tags match, matching any one line or every line.
- Switch on A shelf on the register to narrow the register's products to it, and Can be shown on the website for a products section on your site.
- Under Shown in this order, pick how its products are shown: Custom, dragged into place by their handles (a collection that fills itself keeps the catalog's order), or by name, by price, or newest or oldest first.
The collections themselves are shown in the order of the list on Collections: drag one by its handle to move it. The register's shelves, the website, the online store and catalogs all follow these orders.
A new product that fits a collection that fills itself is in it from the moment it is saved.
Categories, brands, tags and custom fields
- Categories, Brands and Tags organize products for finding them, filtering them and filling collections.
- Custom Fields, kept under Settings, Records, Fields & objects, hold facts there is no field for: hair type, scent family, country of origin, a link to the safety sheet. A new field goes into a draft and is on every product under More about it once the draft is published; choose whether it shows on the website. The same registry keeps fields on clients and the rest, and kinds of record of your own: see Fields & objects.
- Customers lists everyone who has bought a product, at the register or on an order.
Bringing products over
From Shopify: in Shopify, open Products, choose Export, pick all products and a plain CSV file, then choose Import on the Products tab and pick that file. Any spreadsheet with the same columns works, including the app's own export. The whole file is checked first and you see what it will do: products to add, those here already at the same address (updated from the file or left as they are, as you choose), and any that cannot come in. It then comes in a few products at a time with their pictures, and can be undone as one while nothing it added has been sold or changed. See Bringing your records over.
For shipping and wholesale
On the product, weigh it (rates by weight and labels use it), set its Packaging and Case Packs, and its Customs details for parcels abroad: the HS code and the country it was made in. A product can be Wholesale only.
Best practices
- Always tie a product to its parts. Otherwise selling it never moves stock, and reorder levels never trigger.
- One product with variants beats a list of near-identical products; the store shows one page with a choice.
- Let collections fill themselves from a brand or a tag. They stay right as you add products.
- Weigh everything you ship. A missing weight counts as nothing and undercharges shipping.
- Use Price it was for a real sale, then clear it when the sale is over.