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The key to building your shop is adding products to its catalog, and while PrestaShop makes it easy to streamline that process as much as possible, you might still need a hand in getting the hang of it all. Indeed, there are many fields to pages that you can fill in with a lot of data, and many forms to validate.
That is the purpose of this chapter: to take you through all the tabs that weren't explored in the previous chapter ("Adding Products and Product Categories"), explaining each form and detailing every field, so that you can get up to speed quickly with your shop, know what data you need in order to prove useful to the customer customers and in the end, sell more.
Throughout the product set up, we are going to tackle how to use several key tabs for your products.
Tracking
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Products
The "Products" page and its dozen of tabs per product are explained in details in the previous chapter, "Adding Products and Product Categories".
Categories
The "Categories" page is explained in details in the previous chapter, "Adding Products and Product Categories".
Monitoring
The "Monitoring" tab indicates the sections of your store to which you must pay the most attention in order to manage your store.
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- List of empty categories. Shows Gives you the ID and name of catalog categories that do not have any products. Delete the You should either delete these empty categories, or fill them with productsat least one product. This prevents customers from finding themselves in an empty category in your storeshop.
- List of disabled products. Shows you the ID and name of products products with attributes and without available quantities for sale.
- List of products without attributes and without available quantities for sale. Gives you which products are no longer in stock. Take the necessary measures to restock them.
- List of disabled products. Gives you the products that have been disabled in the store and that aren't visible to your customers. Consider either enabling them (maybe after restocking them) or deleting them from your catalog.
- List of out of stock products (with/without) attributes. Shows you which products are no longer in stock. Take the necessary measures to restock them.
The "Tracking" tab should be checked regularly in order to improve your catalog management.
The "Monitoring" page should be checked regularly in order to improve your catalog management.
Attributes and Values
Attributes are the basis of product combinations: you can only create variations of a product if its attributes change. Attributes are configured on a per-product basis, from the "Product" page under the "Catalog" tab, but they must first be registered on your shop using the tool on the "Attributes and Values" page under the "Catalog" tab.
To add a type of attribute, or in other words, to add a group of variation possibilities (colors, capacity, material, etc.), click on "Add new Attributes". A new page appears.
Fill out the form:
- Name. The exact description of the attribute. This needs to be short but precise, so as to not confuse it with another attribute.
- Public name. The attribute name, as displayed to the customers on the product page. Since some attributes might have the same name for varying content, this field enables you to still present it correctly within the product's context, while being able to easily tell a product from another with a similar name but different meaning.
- Attribute type. Enables you to choose whether the product's page should display this attribute's values as a drop-down list, a radio button list, or a color picker.
Save your new attribute to return to the attributes list, then click on "Add new Values". Another page appears.
Fill out the form:
- Attribute type. From the dropdown list, select one of the available attributes.
- Value. Give a value to the attribute: "Red", "16 Gb", "1.21 gigawatts"...
The next attributes are only shown if the attribute is a color type.
- Color. If the value is a color, you can enter its value in HTML color code (i.e. "#79ff52" or "lightblue"), or use the color picker to precisely show the correct hue.
- Texture. If your product does not use a solid color but rather a textured one (i.e. tiger stripes), you can upload a small image file that will be displayed on the product's page. Note that this will replace the HTML color from the field above. Click on the "Save" button is order to start the upload.
- Current texture. Once you have uploaded a texture file, it is displayed in this section as a reminderp.
To add a choice to the group of attributes that you just created, you must create a specific variation.
Select the attribute group then click on "Add attribute" and fill out the form that appears.
Fill out the value for your variation, then select the appropriate group from the drop-down menu.
To have a better understanding of this notion, an Attributes Group can be Color or Weight whereas the attributes themselves can be the colors green, yellow, or brown, or weights of 4 pounds, 8 pounds, or 16 pounds.
In the screenshot below, you can see how to edit an attribute: select the attribute that you want to modify, and a form will appear.
Click on the "edit" icon on the left of the color you want to edit, and a new form will appear:
Choose the HTML color or upload a photo from your computer (if you are displaying textures instead of colors, for instance). The HTML color will then be replaced by the photo of the texture.
Manufacturers
By entering information about the manufacturers, your site's visitors can have rapid access to all of this manufacturer's products. This makes navigating around your site easier for them. In terms of visibility, filling out these fields will improve your position in search engines.
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