LemonStand Blog

Products Anatomy - Part 1

4 | published by Aleksey B. on Wednesday, September 16, 2009

In this post I'm going to explain some of the product properties in LemonStand. We tried to cover all possible needs related to selling products using LemonStand. Some product properties, like product name and description, are intuitive and easy to understand. But there are 4 things which you might wonder about in the beginning:

• Options
• Extras
• Attributes
• Grouped products

Here is a Product page from the front-end demo site, demonstrating all four types of a product properties:

Product options

Product options are product characteristics which do not affect product's price or other product parameters. For example - colors of shoes or left handed and right handed golf clubs. You can manage product options on the Options tab. For each option you should specify the option name and a list of possible option values.

Customers can select product options before adding a product to the shopping cart and you will see selected options in the order details.

Extra options

Extra options enable you to create paid add-ons, for example, gift wrapping, or extra memory for a computer. You can manage product extras on the Extras tab of the product form.

For each extra you should specify its description and price.

Customers can select extra options using check boxes on the product page, before adding the product to the cart. In the product details you will see which extra options were selected.

Product attributes

Product attributes are just bits of text information about the product. Customers cannot select attributes on the product page - they can only read them.

Attributes are used to describe specific product characteristics. If your product is a inkjet printer, you can specify the model-specific details like print speed and resolution. You can mange product attributes on the Attributes tab of the product form.

Attributes allow you to keep product information well organized. You can save a set of product attributes as a template and reuse the template for other products. This saves a lot of time if you have 100 inkjet printers in the database. You won't need to create every single attribute for each printer. Instead, you just load a saved attribute set and enter attribute values, corresponding to that specific printer.

Grouped products

With the Grouped Products feature you can create a general product with choices for different prices and any other characteristics. Each grouped product is a separate product with its own SKU, but presented on the store web-site as a single product. For example, if you sell image prints, and each print is presented in two sizes with different price, you can use the grouped products feature. The print will be presented as a single product, and customers will be able to select specific size from a drop-down menu.

You can manage grouped products on the Grouped tab of the product form. Creating grouped products is fairly simple in LemonStand. You just click the Add grouped product link, and LemonStand creates a copy of the original product and displays it in a popup window. You only need to enter a grouped product's SKU, price and parameters which differ from the original product. You can change name, description or any other parameter of a grouped product.

On the front-end of the store, your customers select a specific grouped product from a drop-down list. LemonStand updates the product page each time when the customer selects another item in the drop-down menu. Thus, for each grouped product, the customer can see its price and other details.

The example images of the front-end product page are taken from our Demo Store. It is needless to say that with LemonStand you can create product pages that look completely different from the demo.