Working with Products
Product Overview - Add, Edit, Copy & Delete
| New Product
To get started adding products just click the New Product button on the RealCart toolbar. The product wizard will appear.
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| Edit Product
To edit an existing product just select the product on the left side of the program window that you want to edit and click the Edit Product button on the RealCart toolbar.
(If no product is selected this button will be grayed out.)
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| Copy Product
To copy an existing product just select the product on the left side of the program window that you want to copy and click the Copy Product button on the RealCart toolbar. Copying a product is useful for adding a product that is very similar to an existing product in your store. After copying a product you can then edit the product to change the things that are different including stock number, names and description.
(If no product is selected this button will be grayed out.)
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| Delete Product
To delete an existing product just click select the product on the left side of the program window that you want to delete and click the Delete Product button on the RealCart toolbar. You can also delete a product by removing it from the All Products department.
(If no product is selected this button will be grayed out.)
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A complete list of all the toolbar buttons as well as explanations for what each of them do can be found in Section 1.3.1.
Working with Products
There are three attributes of your products that can make your store look very good or look very bad from a layout and design standpoint as well as affect the accuracy of your weight-based shipping calculations. Let’s examine what these attributes are as well as some guidelines on how to enter your information.
The names you use for your products must adhere to a size limitation so your store pages will remain physically small enough in width to fit on the screens of most internet users. Keep in mind that the majority of internet users have a screen resolution set at 800 x 600. Sometimes the hardest thing for some web designers to understand is that not everyone has a 19" monitor. You can control how good your store looks by trying to keep to some size standards when entering info into the program. Here are the product names and the approximate lengths to keep them.
- SHORT product name This name should be kept around 20 characters or less to prevent potential problems with secure order providers. If these “short names” aren’t short the shopping cart applet in the corner of the shopper’s screen will have a horizontal scroll bar in it and they will have to scroll left to right to read the cart contents.
- LONGER product name This name should be kept around 50 characters or less so that themes with “Pulldown menus” won’t be so wide that the shopper has to scroll from side to side just to read the page.
The key to success is to size your browser window to 800 x 600 and then view your store. If it looks good at this resolution then you are OK. If you have to scroll side to side to see the entire page then your product names (or thumbnail images) are likely too wide. The key to success is not to try to put your product description in these fields. The program has a product description field that has no limit on size. You can be as wordy as you want to in the product description field. Keep the names within these established parameters and you will be fine.
One of the most powerful features of RealCart™ is the image handling capability. RealCart allows you to specify two images for each product. A thumbnail image and a zoom image. Here are the guidelines for proper image size:
- Thumbnail image According to Dictionary.com a thumbnail is defined as:
A reduced image of a graphic or document page, used in order to view multiple images on a screen simultaneously or to download such images more rapidly.
Keeping this in mind you will want to use actual thumbnail sized images as your thumbnails. Although the program may tell you otherwise, as long as your thumbnail images are around 200 pixels in width or less you should be in fine shape. (Height is not as important)
- Zoom images can be much larger. You still want to keep them small enough so that somebody running a computer with a 640 x 480 screen resolution can see the entire image on screen. A good rule of thumb for thumbnail images is to keep them 400 pixels or less in width and 250 pixels or less in height. (The program may suggest otherwise.)
You will want to stay away from progressive JPG images as they do not display in all browsers. Baseline JPG is the standard as well as the only JPG format that RealCart supports. If you are previewing images and your JPG image won’t show up in our image preview dialog it is probably a progressive JPG and will need to be converted before you can use it.
In order to have accurate “Weight-based Shipping” you must have an accurate weight defined for each of your products.
To summarize:
- Watch the length of your product names
- Watch the size of your product images
- Try to enter accurate product weights
If you are all set let’s enter some products!
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