Products

The products page is where you’ll add and edit products. The page has two columns: The left column lists your products, 20 per page, and the right column contains a form for entering product details, such as the product name and price.

It’s finally time to add some products!

Click on the product page in your administration panel. This is accessible by clicking on the e-commerce tab in the top tool bar and then click the products tab.

In the products page you will be presented with two columns. On the left hand side your products are listed. On the right hand side there is a form that you need to complete – such as the name of the product and the price.

The minimum requirements are adding a product name and price. Note that for the product to visible on your site you need to add it to a product category. To get you going every site has a default example category – you can change this at any time.

If you want to attach an image to your product you need to scroll down to the product images box, select the browse button, find the image you want to attach to your product and choose from the options how you want that to display on your site. This is where you can override the thumbnail size you set under Shop Settings: Presentation.

Guide to the Product Details settings

Product name: Make sure your product name is distinctive, since this is the identifying information you’ll receive when your customer places an order.

Product description: This is the basic description of the product, which will appear on the main pages which list multiple products.

Additional description: On the pages which list multiple products, this will be in a collapsed area called “Details”, which the user can click to expand.

Product tags: You can tag your products with multiple labels, and then add a Product Tags widget to let customers choose among your products based on these labels.

Select categories/brands: Choose which categories and/or brands your product should be listed under. You may choose as many as you like. The product will not be visible if it is not in at least one category.

Price and stock control:

Is the product a donation? Check this if you want to allow the customer to set the product price.

Does not use shipping: Use this for digital downloads.

Special/sale price: Check this to input a special price while still displaying the original price above, with a line running through it.

Variation Control:

If the product has any variation sets, such as color or size, you can add them here (you should have created the variation sets on the “Variations” screen, described above. Note that you can set different prices and stock levels for the different variations. To add multiple sets, simply select both of them in turn from the “Add Variation Set” drop-down menu.

Associate with file: This is how to associate one variation with the download file. So if you are selling software, and your variation set is “Format”, with the choices “CD” and “Download”, you would associate “Download” with the file, specified below.

Shipping Details:

Weight: Calculating shipping by weight doesn’t work quite yet, but if you plan to use this feature in the future, you may as well enter the weight information now.

Local shipping fee: Enter the per-item shipping cost for customers in your base country. Recall that this will be added to the base local shipping rate you specified in Shop Settings: Shipping.

International shipping fee: Same as above, except for international sales.

Advanced Options:

Merchant Notes:

This simply a little note pad for writing down internal comments about the product. Merchant notes are visible only to the shop administrator on the product details screen (right where you typed it) — site visitors will never see them. For example, it might be a reminder note about the product, or a personal note to remind you that this particular shipment is defective.

Display on Front Page:

This option lets you specify if the product should be displayed on the front page of the site. This is used either in conjunction with the


shortcode or with the product slider. Also, if your site is using the E-Commerce Theme by Cory Miller, then any products checked with “Display on Front Page” will rotate through the featured product space.

Engrave Text:

If you enable this option, an extra field will appear on your checkout page for users to enter some text to be printed or engraved on the product. For example, when you buy an iPod from apple.com you have the option to have your name engraved on the iPod. Note that this may render the product ineligible for returns.

As the shop owner this will be visible in your Sales Log when you fully open a sales record.

Prohibited by Google:

We have added this option because Google prohibits the sale of certain items, such as pornography, bulk marketing tools, human body parts, etc. (see Google’s policy). If you suspect Google would find your product objectionable then you should check this box.

If there is a prohibited product in the customer’s shopping cart then the Google Checkout button will “grey out” and the customer will not be able to click on it. Obviously, if Google Checkout is your only payment gateway, you should simply disable the offending products by removing them from all product categories.

External Link:

If you want to set up your own e-commerce site but all your products are actually hosted elsewhere (like Amazon.com) then you can set the links on your products page to point to the products hosted elsewhere – so your WP e-Commerce site essentially becomes a shop window for your third-party store.

Add Custom Fields:

Each custom field you add to a product can have a “Name” value and a “Description” value. For example, if you are selling films and your want users to be able to search by directory, you could easily add a name called “Director” with the description value “Steven Spielberg”.

This will display in your products page and is now also searchable

Product Images:

Using the “Browse” button, you can upload a file from your hard drive. It will be added to the wp-content/uploads directory in your WordPress site, and a thumbnail will automatically be generated at the same time. The default size is the one you set in Shop Settings: Presentation.

Product Download:

If you are selling a digital product, here is where you upload the associated file. Note: Some web hosts will time out and appear to crash when you try to upload large files. If this happens you can upload files to wp-content/uploads/wpsc/downloadables using your FTP client and then associate them manually.

If you are uploading a file via FTP you can get it to work with the shop module. Here we go:

  • Upload the file via FTP and copy the name of the file
  • Then go to http://www.md5generator.tk/ and create a hash code out of that filename and note/copy the MD5 code after generating
  • Go to your server’s database and create a new item in wp_product_files (id, filename, mimetype and idhash, date doesn’t matter)
  • In your FTP program choose the file and rename it with the generated MD5 hash code
  • If you have done everything right and refresh the product page in WP e-Commerce you should see the exact filename
  • Now you can choose it and offer it as downloadable file
Related files
  • display-items.php
  • admin-form-functions.php
  • processing_functions.php
  • image_processing.php
  • form_display_functions.php
  • classes/variations.class.php
  • wp-shopping-cart.php

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