Keeping the catalogue honest
You’ll need: Products, Product catalogue reports — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.
A catalogue decays. Prices go stale, translations get missed, products stay published long after you stopped selling them. This lesson is the maintenance habit that stops it.
The catalogue report
Product catalogue reports list your range by category, with two filters that earn their place:
Only missing price finds products a customer could reach with no price on them.
Only missing translation finds products with a name in one language and nothing in another — invisible or embarrassing to half your visitors.
Both are the kind of gap nobody spots by scrolling. Run the report before a campaign, not after a customer finds one.
Archive, do not hide, when you stop selling
Two different tools for two different situations, and the distinction matters:
hide_from_shop still sold, just not on the website
archive no longer sold at all
Hiding a discontinued product leaves it in your lists, your pickers and your reports forever. Archiving takes it out of the way while keeping it attached to every order that ever included it — so last year’s sales history stays intact.
And never rename a discontinued product into a new one. It is the same damage as reusing an old supplier: every past order silently starts describing something you never sold.
The catalogue is shared property
Everyone sells from the same records. A price somebody corrects is corrected for the whole business; a duplicate somebody creates is a duplicate for everybody.
Before creating a product, search — and search on part of a word, because that is how the search works. Two records for the same item split its sales history, and no report will ever tell you the true figure.
A quarterly pass worth the hour
- Run the report for missing prices and missing translations.
- Archive what you no longer sell.
- Check your top categories still describe the range as it is now.
- Review the max discount on categories whose margins have moved.
You have finished
That is Products & Offers. You now know what a product record holds and how it relates to stock, how prices and taxes behave, how customers navigate your range, how discount and commission policy is set by category, how add-ons stay out of the catalogue, how offers package products with their own money rules, how order forms collect what the products cannot, and how partner pages work.
Next in the catalogue is Sales & Customers, which picks these products up and follows them through orders, invoices and payment.
Keep staging.feeprime.com open while you learn it.