Product Groups

The best way to learn about this powerful feature is to play with it a bit. It provides tremendous flexibility in helping your customers find the products they’re looking for.
Groups are a way to organize your product catalog into manageable divisions. The terminology is somewhat confusing, since the “Groups” feature grew out of two earlier features called “Categories” and “Brands”.

The WP e-Commerce installation comes with two default groups: “Categories” and “Brands”. Within these groups, you can create any number of listings; for example, under “Categories” you might have a listing called “Clothing”, with the subcategories “hats”, “shirts”, and “trousers”. And under “Brands” you might have listings for Nike, Adidas, and Reebok. (Initially, the only categories and brands listed are “Example Category” and “Example Brand”.) If you need to organize your products in ways other than Categories and Brands, you can create a new group with its own sub-listings as well.

Then, in the product display form, you can associate products with all the groups and listings which apply to them. For example, a pair of blue jeans could be associated both with “Trousers” and “Jeans”, as well as with “Clothing”.

The final step is to enable the “Product Groups” widget, which will display a hierarchical list of groups, brands, etc., with their sub-listings. Your customers will then be able to browse your store through this menu and more easily see the breadth of your catalog and find the items they’re looking for.

To get started quickly, choose a Product Group you’d like to use to organize your catalog. The shopping cart has two groups by default, Categories and Brands. Pick one, and then start adding names. For example, if you are selling clothing, you can start by picking Categories, and then press “Add New” (in the Manage Categories header). Fill out the form on the right for each category.

Note that you can create a “parent” for the categories. So you might create a hierarchy like this:

    Clothing

  • Men’s
    • Shirts
    • Trousers
  • Women’s
    • Shirts
    • Trousers
  • Accessories

The category “Men’s” has the parent “Clothing”. Here you would have two categories called “Shirts”, one with the parent category “Men’s” and the other with the parent category “Women’s”.

You can write a description for the categories if you like, and to display them you should enable “Show product group description” under Shop Settings: Presentation.

Once you have created some categories or brands, go ahead and delete the “Example” category and brand.

Related Files:

  • wp-e-commerce/display-category.php
  • wp-e-commerce/insertcate.php
  • wp-e-commerce/show_cats_brands.php

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