Keeping the catalogue honest
Before you start, open these. They are both under Sales in the menu: Products and Product Catalog.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
A product list goes bad over time. Prices get old. Translations get missed. Products stay on your website long after you stopped selling them.
This lesson is the habit that stops that happening.
The catalogue report
Sales / Product Catalog lists your products by group. It has two filters that really earn their place.
Only missing price finds products a customer could click on that have no price.
Only missing translation finds products with a name in one language and nothing in the other. Half your visitors either cannot see it, or see something embarrassing.
Nobody spots either of those by scrolling. Run the report before you launch something, not after a customer finds one.
When you stop selling something, archive it
There are two different tools here for two different situations.
hide from shop you still sell it, just not on the website
archive you do not sell it at all any more
If you only hide a product you have stopped selling, it stays in your lists, your pickers and your reports forever.
Archiving takes it out of the way, and keeps it attached to every order that ever included it. So last year’s sales history stays correct.
And never rename a product you stopped selling into a new one. It is the same damage as reusing an old supplier record. Every past order quietly starts describing something you never actually sold.
The product list belongs to everyone
Everybody sells from the same records.
A price one person corrects is corrected for the whole business. A duplicate one person creates is a duplicate for everybody.
So search before you create a product. Search on part of a word, because that is how it works. Two records for the same item split its sales history, and no report will ever show you the real number.
A quarterly check worth an hour
- Run the report for missing prices, and again for missing translations.
- Archive what you no longer sell.
- Check your main groups still describe what you actually sell now.
- Look again at the maximum discount on any group where your margins have changed.
You have finished
That is the end of Products and Offers. Here is what you now know.
- What a product record holds, and how it connects to stock.
- How prices and taxes work.
- How customers find their way around your range.
- How discounts and commission are set per group.
- How add-ons stay out of the main product list.
- How offers bundle products together with their own money rules.
- How order forms collect what the products cannot.
- How partner pages work.
Next is Sales and Customers, which picks these products up and follows them through orders, invoices and payment.
Keep staging.feeprime.com open while you learn it.