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9.1.1
– Merchandising – Product Merchandising – Qty
Pricing
The Merchandising Pricing tab is an area that
allows you to view, edit, or add pricing attributes for a given
product. This sku is also shown in the area directly below the
Product Merchandising Tabs, and prefaced by “Pricing: edit
item”; on the demo the sku displayed is os28057c. Further
down the page are labeled text boxes, and each box is editable and
updates your products database for the applicable
item.
Starting at the top of the page and working down,
the
-
Discount group allows quantity pricing for a group
of products (sometimes known as mix-and-match i.e., where 5 of
these plus 5 of those afford the q10 price for both these and
those).
-
Short Description is not editable and is simply
the products description. It is there to help you recognize which
product you are working with.
-
Product Price – This is the retail price
displayed throughout the site.
-
Dealer Price – This is the price that will
be displayed if the customer is a dealer, and dealer pricing has
been enabled. * The pricing fields need to be set in conjunction
with the Customer Dealer Status
Tab, among other things if you want to use anything
other than the standard pricing mode.
-
Quantity Pricing area contains quantity pricing
for Retail, and Wholesale. Although it is
not shown in the Demo, the first group of Qty boxes (Qty 2, Qty 5,
Qty 10, so on) represents retail, and the second group
wholesale.
-
Qty 2 Retail, 2 or more. If set, this will be the
price per item when the order quantity is 2 or
greater.
-
Qty 5 Retail, 5 or more. If set, this will be the
price per item when the order quantity is 5 or
greater.
-
Qty 10 Retail, 10 or more. If set, this will be
the price per item when the order quantity is 10 or
greater.
-
Qty 25 Retail, 25 or more. If set, this will be
the price per item when the order quantity is 25 or
greater.
-
Qty 100 Retail, 100 or more. If set, this will be
the price per item when the order quantity is 100 or
greater.
-
Qty 2 Dealer, 2 or more. If set, this will be the
dealer price per item when the order quantity is 2 or
greater.
-
Qty 5 Dealer, 5 or more. If set, this will be the
dealer price per item when the order quantity is 5 or
greater.
-
Qty 10 Dealer, 10 or more. If set, this will be
the dealer price per item when the order quantity is 10 or
greater.
-
Qty 25 Dealer, 25 or more. If set, this will be
the dealer price per item when the order quantity is 25 or
greater.
-
Qty 100
Dealer, 100 or more. If set, this will be the dealer price per item
when the order quantity is 100 or greater.
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9.1.2
– Merchandising – Product Merchandising –
Upsell
The Merchandising Upsell tab is a location to
select which products, if any, will be placed in an Upsell list to
be associated with the current Product being edited. What this
means is that you can select products that you think customers may
be interested in if they are looking at the current product. To
select products that you wish to be associated with this one,
simply type the sku’s or product part numbers, separated by
white space into the text box labeled “Up-sell SKUs”,
and click on OK. In the example, one product, os28057a, has been
selected as an upsell item for this item, os28057c. If you wanted
more than one, you would have entered them like
this:
os28057c os29870b os578898q
You could also use the
select… link next to the Upsell SKUs text
window. This will take you to a page with all of your products
listed. You can simple use a checkbox method to choose as many
products as you wish to be associated with this product for Upsell.
In many cases, this can simplify things quite a bit, you
don’t have to remember which SKU is associated with which
product and so on. However, if your database holds thousands of
products this page can be quite formidable!
Settings in table options linked by sku.
This has been
eliminated.
To use the Upsell list, you need to use the
component “Upsell” in a selected page. The flypage is a
good page to use the Upsell component on, as it is the page that
displays a single products detail, and you can show associated
products that a customer might be interested in. For more
information on how to use the Upsell and other components, go to
the Content –
Content Edit area.
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9.1.3
– Merchandising – Product Merchandising –
Cross-sell
The Merchandising Cross-Sell tab, is very similar
to the Upsell Tab. This is a location to select which products, if
any, will be placed in a Cross-Sell list to be associated with the
current Product being edited. What this means is that you can
select products that you think customers may be interested in if
they are looking at the current product being edited. To select
products that you wish to be associated with this one, simply type
the sku’s or product part numbers, separated by white space
into the text box labeled with Up-sell SKUs, and click on OK. In
addition to being able to associate products with this product, you
can also associate this product with a Cross-Sale Category. This
means that the product can belong to a family of products that will
be associated on various pages of the site depending on where in
the site you wish to have them shown. For example, if your product
was a 10 penny Nail, you may assign it to a Cross-sale category of
Nails. Then you may have the category show up every time someone
looked at hammers. You know, if you have a hammer, you “gotta
have a nail”! The category may display one or two cross-sell
items, or maybe display random items from the category. You control
it all. But the list to choose from is chosen
here.
In the Cross –Sell tab you can also create a
Teaser line that will introduce the component, such as “Other
related items:” or “You may also like…”
and so on. This will appear as a mini header on the Cross –
Sell Component.
Next text box in Cross – Sell is the Closer.
The Closer is the companion to the Teaser and is used at the end of
the component if desired. Some thing to get the customer to act
such as “Buy now while quantities last” or
“Limited Time Offer”.
Settings in table options linked by sku.
This has been
eliminated
To use
the Cross-sell list, you need to use the component
“Cross-sell” in a selected page. The results page is a
good page to use the Cross-sell component on, as it is the page
that displays the results of a search entered by the customer. You
can show associated products that a customer might be interested
in. For more information on how to use the Cross - sell and other
components, go to the Content –
Content Edit area.
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9.1.4
– Merchandising – Product Merchandising –
Promotion
The Merchandising Promotion tab is similar to the
Cross - sell Tab. Although the Promotion tab is similar to the
Cross – sell tab, it has some important differences. First
the Promotion tab does not let you associate this item directly
with other items, or other items directly with it. What it does do
is allow you to associate this product with a Promotion. You can
associate as many items with a promotion as you like, so in that
sense they are being linked, but not directly with each other. Lets
go down the page, shown above and detail each
area.
We start with the Short Description, which is
simply the description for the product being edited. Next is the
drop down window labeled “Promotions”. This is where
you will select which promotion you want to associate the product
with. The default promotions are none, Specials, New Items, and
expired. These can be expanded, but you will need your Interchange
Developer to help with this. So lets continue with
the defaults. Really the only 2 we are interested in are Specials,
and New Items. Let’s use New Items, and assume this is a new
item.
The next box down is the Teaser line. This will
replace the Name of the item in the display, so you may want to
keep the name involved, such as in the example above we have
“New Product – 24”
Level”.
Next text box in Cross – Sell is the Closer.
The Closer is the companion to the Teaser and is used at the end of
the component if desired. Some thing to get the customer to act
such as “Buy now ” or “Limited Time Offer”.
This line will replace the standard “More Info” link if
used.
The next 3 boxes are Timed?, Start Date, End Date
and they work together. If you only want your product to be in a
promotion for a certain time period, this is where you set those
limits. First, select yes for the Timed? drop down. Next select
your start date, then the end date. That’s all there is to
it. Set it and forget it. (-:
To use the Promotion settings, you need to use the
component “Promotion” in a selected page. The index
page is a good page to use the Promotion component on, as it is the
page that the customer normally sees first. You can show your
newest products, or your best deals. Remember, first you only get
one chance at a first impression! For more information on how to
use the Promotion and other components, go to the Content –
Content Edit area.
Settings in table options linked by sku.
This has been
eliminated
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9.2
– Merchandising – Affiliates
9.2.1
– Merchandising – Affiliates – Affiliates
Manager
The Affiliates Manager is an area to setup,
manage, and delete affiliates. What is an affiliate? The dictionary
definition is: “A person, organization, or establishment
associated with another as a subordinate, subsidiary, or member:
network affiliates.” In our case, an affiliate will normally be
another vendor, who has agreed to advertise our goods or services
somewhere on their web site, in return for something from us. The
reciprocal agreement may be as simple as each of us putting a
banner of the others site on our site. Other affiliate agreements
can become more complex, consisting of payment for numbers of
visitors, or perhaps payments for numbers of sales to visitors that
originated or were sent to us by our
Affiliate.
To accommodate
this type of arrangement, Interchange offers a simple affiliate
manager. You can create any number of affiliates, and track them
according to visits and/or sales. To examine how you can do this,
lets start with the page shown above.
On the entry page
to Affiliates, there is one tab, Create
New Affiliate,
which we will talk about in just a minute. But lets move down the
page a little further.
First you have a
limit with search box, along with the Limit with search button. If
you have a large number of affiliates, this will allow you to find
the one you are looking for by using a search
mechanism.
Next is a table
of Affiliates. The column headings are:
-
This lists the
Linkback url, a url that can be entered to redirect a visitor to a
different page or even website depending on which affiliate and/or
campaign they happen to be associated with. Can be clicked on to
validate location.
-
Also listed is
the Enter URL, which is the url that will be used to identify the
affiliate when a visitor accesses the
site.
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9.2.1a – Merchandising –
Affiliates – Affiliates editor
The affiliate editor is a location where you can
make changes to or delete an affiliate. The screen above has 10
fill in fields to work with your Affiliate. It also has the
standard OK, Cancel, Delete buttons, and the Auto-export checkbox.
In most all cases you will want to leave the default check in the
Auto-export checkbox. This synchronizes the Interchange internal
database with the .txt file. Ok simply saves your changes, Cancel
lets you leave the screen without saving any changes and
DELETE gets rid of the affiliate without recourse! Be
careful with DELETE!
*An important caveat
for the Affiliate program: Some of the
features describe below, in particular the Coupon campaign and the
Coupon Discount will only work if the component affiliate_receptor
is installed on the receiving page of the target URL. More
information on components and their use can be found here.
The affiliate_receptor component was built to demonstrate one of
the many possibilities for the affiliate program. Contact your
Interchange Developer for
additional components, or if you have trouble getting this to work
properly.
Lets move on and describe the 10 affiliate
editable fields:
-
Affiliate ID – This is the id that you gave
the affiliate when you created them. This can be letters or
numbers. If you are simply editing the affiliate, leave this alone.
This will also be the affiliates name to use in conjunction with
password for affiliate login to the Affiliate
Headquarters. TIP: If you
change this, it will create a new affiliate, with all the same
attributes of the current one. So use with
caution.
-
Affiliate Name – This field is for the
proper name of the affiliate. Use whatever you desire to describe
your affiliate. (Really,,,anything, they won’t look , unless
you send them a report! )
-
Campaigns
– A campaign is a way to use a common program across multiple
affiliates. Or you can use campaigns to sub categorize multiple
programs within a single affiliate. Here are 2
examples.
-
*Suppose you have a product that you
want to give a five-dollar off coupon, for all participating
affiliates as an added incentive. You create a campaign; lets call
it “coupon”. You now tell your affiliate to put the
following link on their site;
-
Suppose you are paying for click throughs on a
search engine, and you have multiple terms registered. Most pay per
click programs allow you to use a custom URL for each search term.
And suppose you have 3 search terms at a specific search engine.
Rather than creating a separate affiliate for each term, you could
use campaigns. Lets say the three search terms where: quality
products, factory direct products, and user-friendly manuals. You
would use the following url’s at the search
engine:
Remember to include the following in the
URL if coupons are enabled - “coupon=1” as in
http://www.mysite.com/index.html?mv_pc=affiliate&coupon=1”
-
Join Date – This reflects the date the
affiliate joined the program.
-
*URL – In some cases you may
want an affiliate directed visitor to have access to pages that
“normal” visitors do not. You can enter a url in this
field, and when the visitor clicks through using the affiliate link
(and the affiliate_receptor component)
-
Timeout Delay – The value in this field is
used to specify the amount of time a customer has to place an order
to still give the Affiliate credit for it. If the customer goes
over this amount of time, the Affiliate doesn't get credit for the
customer visit. The timeout delay is measured in seconds, with the
value of 0 (zero) disabling it. It is recommended that you use a
value in the thousands to make sure the customer has enough time to
shop.
-
Active – A yes or no dropdown window that
allows you to make the affiliate active or inactive. All the
information is saved, but none of the functions or reports will be
active.
-
Password – Use this area to enter a password
for affiliate to use in conjunction with their Affiliate ID to
access the Affiliate
Headquarters.
-
Image – URL of affiliates logo, will be used
on the entry page containing affiliate_receptor component and on
the Affiliate
Headquarters.
We have
mentioned the Affiliate
Headquarters. This is simply a page that the affiliates
can access to view the status of their account, and obtain the
proper URL addresses to insert into their web sites so that
customers can visit your site via the affiliate-tracking program.
In the Demo they can access a general URL for access, as well as
URLs that allow the ordering of each of the products in the
products database. They can log into the Affiliate Headquarters by
going to a URL you supply them, and use their Affiliate ID and
password describe above. The URL in the Demo is:
http://demo.icdevgroup.org/i/demo1/affiliate/login.html
The URL of course will be different for your site,
but you should be able to figure it out by looking at this one. In
the catalog the affiliate pages are located under the
catalog/affiliates/ folder.
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9.2.2
– Merchandising – Affiliates – Create New
Affiliate
The Create New Affiliate is identical to the Edit
Affiliate area. The screen above has 10 fill in fields to work with
your Affiliate. It also has the standard OK, Cancel, Delete
buttons, and the Auto-export checkbox. In most all cases you will
want to leave the default check in the Auto-export checkbox. This
synchronizes the Interchange internal database with the .txt file.
Ok simply saves your changes, Cancel lets you leave the screen
without saving any changes and DELETE gets rid of the
affiliate without recourse! Be careful with
DELETE!
*An important caveat
for the Affiliate program: Some of the features describe
below, in particular the Coupon campaign and the Coupon Discount
will only work if the component affiliate_receptor is installed on
the receiving page of the target URL. More
information on components and their use can be found here.
The affiliate_receptor component was built to demonstrate one of
the many possibilities for the affiliate program. Contact your
Interchange Developer for
additional components, or if you have trouble getting this to work
properly.
Lets move on and describe the 10 affiliate
editable fields:
-
Affiliate ID – This is the id that you will
give to the affiliate. This can be letters or numbers. This will
also be the affiliates name to use in conjunction with password for
affiliate login to the Affiliate
Headquarters.
-
Affiliate Name – This field is for the
proper name of the affiliate. Use whatever you desire to describe
your affiliate. (Really,,,anything, they won’t look , unless
you send them a report! )
-
Campaigns – A campaign is a way to use a
common program across multiple affiliates. Or you can use campaigns
to sub categorize multiple programs within a single affiliate. Here
are 2 examples.
-
*Suppose you have a product that you
want to give a five-dollar off coupon, for all participating
affiliates as an added incentive. You create a campaign; lets call
it “coupon”. You now tell your affiliate to put the
following link on their site;
-
http://www.yoursite.com/product.html?mv_pc=affiliate_name&mv_action=go&campaign=coupon&coupon=1
-
-
Now when
a visitor clicks on this link, they will be brought to the site
using this URL, and the proper information will be recorded. In
addition, if you have filled in an amount in the coupon_amount
field (discussed below) the proper amount will be deducted from the
order when the customer places an item in the cart. Of course you
can use this same coupon campaign for any number of
affiliates.
-
Suppose you are paying for click throughs on a
search engine, and you have multiple terms registered. Most pay per
click programs allow you to use a custom URL for each search term.
And suppose you have 3 search terms at a specific search engine.
Rather than creating a separate affiliate for each term, you could
use campaigns. Lets say the three search terms where: quality
products, factory direct products, and user-friendly manuals. You
would use the following url’s at the search
engine:
Remember to include the following in the
URL if coupons are enabled - “coupon=1” as in
http://www.mysite.com/index.html?mv_pc=affiliate&coupon=1”
-
Join Date – This reflects the date the
affiliate joined the program.
-
*URL – In some cases you may
want an affiliate directed visitor to have access to pages that
“normal” visitors do not. You can enter a url in this
field, and when the visitor clicks through using the affiliate link
(and the affiliate_receptor component)
-
Timeout Delay – The value in this field is
used to specify the amount of time a customer has to place an order
to still give the Affiliate credit for it. If the customer goes
over this amount of time, the Affiliate doesn't get credit for the
customer visit. The timeout delay is measured in seconds, with the
value of 0 (zero) disabling it. It is recommended that you use a
value in the thousands to make sure the customer has enough time to
shop.
-
Active – A yes or no dropdown window that
allows you to make the affiliate active or inactive. All the
information is saved, but none of the functions or reports will be
active.
-
Password – Use this area to enter a password
for affiliate to use in conjunction with their Affiliate ID to
access the Affiliate
Headquarters.
-
Image – URL of affiliates logo, will be used
on the entry page containing affiliate_receptor component and on
the Affiliate
Headquarters.
We have mentioned the Affiliate Headquarters. This is simply a page
that the affiliates can access to view the status of their account,
and obtain the proper URL addresses to insert into their web sites
so that customers can visit your site via the affiliate-tracking
program. In the Demo they can access a general URL for access, as
well as URLs that allow the ordering of each of the products in the
products database. They can log into the Affiliate Headquarters by
going to a URL you supply them, and use their Affiliate ID and
password describe above. The URL in the Demo is:
http://demo.icdevgroup.org/i/demo1/affiliate/login.html
The URL of course will be different for your site,
but you should be able to figure it out by looking at this one. In
the catalog the affiliate pages are located under the
catalog/affiliates/ folder.
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9.3
– Merchandising – Generate “others who
…”
We will not include a screen shot for this tab.
This tab is intended to be used as a device to generate a list of
items in the others_bought field of the merchandising table. It
will look in the orderline database and collect each product that
was ordered along with other products in the same
order.
Once this data is in place, you can configure the
Shopping Cart Full component, to display the “Others who
bought this product also bought:”. You could also use the
code in the component to create your own component or page to
display this.
If you are using the Others Bought code anywhere
on your site, it is a good idea to use this tab frequently, as it
will consistently update your data to reflect the most recent
buying trends.
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