Managing your WP e-Commerce Online Store

Adding New Products

Prepare your images so they have the correct dimensions and file size. Many online stores use square images. Avoid very large file sizes as they will slow down your site.

Go to Dashboard, Store, Products and use the Add new Product field to enter the details of your new product.

• Name: the name of the product
• SKU: Stock Keeping Unit, a reference code for your own purposes
• Price: the standard retail price of the product
• Sale: the sale price (if lower than standard, the pricing will appear as strikethrough pricing when displayed)
• Description: The text that appears next to the product.
• Additional Description: appears under automatic’+More information’ link if entered (and also on single product pages)
• Categories: add to categories to control which pages the product appears on
• Tax checkbox: unless you have a special tax setup, all store products show tax inclusive pricing – leave this unticked.
• Limited number of items in stock: set this if you want inventory to be managed (if inventory level is 0, product cannot be sold.)
• Shipping Details: record the packaged weight, height, width and length of the product – this will be used for Australia Post shipping quotes.
• Product Image: upload your main product image (usually square)

Product Images

WP e-Commerce (WPEC) will automatically generate product thumbnails for you from product images that you upload.  We suggest:

• come up with a standard aspect ratio for your product images e.g. 1: 1 (square) or 4:3 (rectangular)
• make sure your full size images AND your thumbnail settings in WPEC use the same aspect ratio to avoid squashing/stretching effects in your thumbnails
• for example, if your full size product images will be 400px wide by 300px high, make sure your product thumbnails use the same ratio, such as 100px wide by 75px high

Product Variations and Shipping Weights

Note!: if you are going to use variations you need to follow these instructions carefully if you want to avoid a lot of additional data entry.

If you are using product variations together with product weights (for example, if you are using the Australia Post shipping module), then you’ll need to use this method to ensure all products (and all variations) have a weight defined.

1. Click Add New Product.
2. Complete the product details, including the weight in the normal product weight field.
3. Save the product (as a draft or published).
4. Scroll down to the variation control section, then tick the appropriate variations.
5. The new variations will be created, with the weight for each variation being taken from the actual product’s weight. This means it doesn’t have to be re-entered for every single variation.

If you set up the variations BEFORE you save the product to the database, then the default variation weights will be zero, and if zero weights are passed to the Australia Post interface an error will result.

Adding new Categories

You can create new pages in your website to display all products for a specific category. Product groupings might be by Category (fishing rods, fishing reels) and/or Brand (Sage, Daiwa).

• Go to Dashboard, Store, Categories.
• Choose whether to work with Categories or Brands (or other groupings you have set up)
• Add a new category within that grouping. If you aren’t using pages that show multiple categories, then you can ignore the description/image information and just enter the name.

Displaying Products in Pages

You can add a category of products to a page using the default shortcode supported by WP eCommerce:
[wpsc_products category_url_name='xyzcategory']

You can add an individual product to a page or post using the default shortcodes supported by WP eCommerce:
Display Product Shortcode: [wpsc_products product_id='10']
Buy Now Shortcode: [buy_now_button=10]
Add to Cart Shortcode: [add_to_cart=10]

To include an Add to Cart button for one or more products with a Qty field, use this custom developed OM4 shortcode:
[wpsc_add_to_cart_multiple items="1:Product 1 Description,2:Product 2 Description" showqtyfield=true qty=1]

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