dynocat1351
Joined: 22 Jan 2008
Posts: 10
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 Posted: Mar 01, 2008 09:28am Post subject: Special Order Product setup |
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I have some products that are Special Order only. They are never "In Stock" and have 0 on hand quantity.
How to I set those up, so customer will know they are special order only. Also I do not want to receive low inventory notices for these items.
Thanks |
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Answering Your Questions Since... 9:30am
Joined: 28 Aug 2005
Posts: 113
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| Posted: Mar 02, 2008 02:49pm Post subject: |
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Excellent questions. There may be several ways to obtain the results you're looking for. Below is information on what I think may be the best approach:
| Quote: | | They are never "In Stock" and have 0 on hand quantity... I do not want to receive low inventory notices for these items. |
Let's address this requirement first. The simplest way to prevent low inventory notices for a product is to set it to have "Infinite Stock". A product set to have an infinite stock level will be ignored when the system scans for products with low stock levels.
It may be helpful to determine whether or not you know how many of the product you'll eventually have in stock. Will there be a definite number of units available? Or, is this a custom product in which every unit is unique? If a definite number of units of the product will eventually be in stock, it may be possible to set the product to have that many units in stock instead of "infinite stock"; even if those units won't be available until a future date. The next sections expand on this idea...
| Quote: | | I have some products that are Special Order only... How to I set those up, so customer will know they are special order only. |
Each page of the storefront has its own template. Some pages, such as the product pages, are special because each product can even have a unique template, instead of sharing a single template between all products.
To really make a set of products stand out, you may want to create a unique version of the template that is used on the Product Details page in your storefront. For example, this could be done by these steps:
1. Open your store's Template Editor. The Template Editor is located in your store's administration area at: [Navigation Menu > Design > HTML Templates].
2. On the "HTML Templates" page, select the Design Package you want to work with from the menu, and click the "Load" button. This will load a list of all that Design Package's templates on the left-side of the page. Click on the link for the "product" template.
3. This will load your current "product" page's template in the Editor. We now have a copy of the current product page's template loaded in the Template Editor.
4. Now we want to create a new template, based on the "product" template, which can be customized to shout "this is a special order product". The new template will then be applied to those products. To do this, click the "Save as a NEW HTML template" button after entering a name for the new version of the template in the "New name..." field next to the button. In this scenario, I'd recommend a name of something like "special_order_product" for the new template.
5. The new "special_order_product" template has now been created. Now comes the fun part: customize the HTML code in this new template with a big banner, big text, or other content declaring that this is a special order product. Alter the template any way you like so that it clearly communicates this to your customers.
6. Click the "Save my changes..." button to record your changes to the new template.
7. Next, we'll apply this template to the special order product(s) in your store. This can be done in the Product Editor, located at: [Navigation Menu > Products > Search Products]. On the Search Products page, locate the desired product and click the circular "e" button to edit it.
8. In the Product Editor, click the "Display Options" tab. This will load a screen with options related to how this product is displayed in your store. The "Product Page Template" menu will contain a list of all the templates in your store's live Design Package. Select the new template you just created and click the "Submit" button to save your changes.
Now when this product is viewed in your storefront the new custom "special_order_product" template will be displayed, instead of the default "product" template that all the other products use.
Bonus Round: Taking and Fulfilling Pre-Orders
This wasn't specifically addressed in your question, but I thought it may be helpful to also provide a suggestion on how products such as this can easily be sold now, and then billed and shipped when they become available at a future date.
This can be accomplished by actually creating two products: the pre-sale version and the future shipped version. Using the Subscription Products module, these two products can be daisy-chained together. Thus, the pre-sale version can be put up for sale in the storefront, and when customers buy it, a follow-up order for the version to be shipped in the future will automatically be added to your store records. This way, both you and the customer can track the fulfillment of the product when it eventually becomes available.
The process described above can be done using the same concept described in the "Sell a Free Trial Period product" article in this forum. This article is located at: http://forums.modularmerchant.com/viewtopic/494/
I hope this information is helpful. Let us know if you have any other questions on this topic!
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