You are looking to create an online store but you need to know how to organise your products.
Setting Up Categories
Before you can start adding products, have a think about what categories they fall into and set this up first. For example, if you were selling cakes you may split this down into Wedding Cakes, Birthday Cakes, and Cupcakes. Having more concise categories will make it easier for customers to find what they are looking for and is much better for your Search Engine Optimization – SEO.
Adding Products
Here are the 6 steps to adding a basic product to your store;
1. Product Name
This should be kept simple and have relevant keywords to make it easier for customers to find the products they are looking for.
2. Product Code / SKU
This can be whatever you want. You can use the product code the manufacturer provides or make one up yourself. This can be used to help you manage your stock and orders. The Product SKU/ Code may display on your store when viewing the details of a product (dependent on your selected design). If you do not enter a Unique Product Identifier for a product, we will automatically use the Product SKU/ Code as the MPN.
3. Category
Every product on your eCommerce website needs to belong to a category. Decide which category the product belongs under so that it helps customers to navigate your website and find the products they are interested in. We also ask for a Google category. The Google Category can be different from your store category.
4. Price
Price your products competitively whilst making a nice profit. We suggest doing your market research and looking at what your competitors are selling at. Remember it is not always about who is cheaper. If the quality of your products is good people will be willing to pay a little extra.
5. Description
In this section add all the details about the product. Your aim here is to sell the product and make it clear to the customer exactly what the product is. The description should be detailed but keep it relevant. Freewebstore allows you to add a Short Description and a Rich Text Description. The short description is used in many places to promote your product such as product result lists (marketplaces), featured products, meta tags and more. We recommend about 150 characters for this. The Rich Text Description appears primarily on your main product details page and should contain a rich description of the product, its attributes, plus all the features and benefits of owning it. This description can contain rich text, HTML, and media such as images, icons, and video files. We recommend about 1000 characters for this section.
6. Image
The product image is one of your strongest selling points. An image that doesn’t look good will not sell a product. We recommend uploading images that are no larger than 500 Kilobytes – this is because large images can take a long time to load on websites – slow page load speeds can be frustrating for your customers. It is also a good idea to have more than one image for each product. This means it can be viewed from different angles or in front of different backgrounds – freewebstore thinks a plain white background is a good option.
Product Variations
Setting up product variations allows you to provide different versions of the same product without the need to create a whole new product. Products can be grouped up in this way to give customers more options.
You can set the variations however you like. For this example we will use cakes again – you may have your main product as ‘Pink 40th birthday cake’ with shape variation of square or circle. A size option of 1 tier, two tier or 3 tier and a filling option of chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. This allows customers to find the product they like and then make more specific decisions to better fit what they need without cluttering your page with hundreds of similar variations that may overwhelm a customer.
More information on this can be found in this guide on extra information you can add to products.
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