Adding One Product

1. Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store, see that the selected language is English and click the  +  button in the upper right part of the page.

   

2. The product creation page will open. If you want the English information about the book to appear in all other languages, follow these guidelines:
   
   a) Enter the Name of the book. If it's too long or has any subtitle, shorten the title, so that the Name field contains up to 40 signs, and leave the rest for the full bibliographic description.
   
   b) Select the categories in which the book will be displayed. You may selectq for instance, 3 categories in the Subject classification, 1 category in Genre, 1 in Format, and 1 in Language - if the book is ABOUT some language, NOT IN this language. The language OF the book will be entered later on.
   
   c) Select Simple product. If you have two books editions - one in Hardcover and one in Paperback, you may select to Configure product variations, but this can be done also later - with the Options function.
   
   d) Enter the Price in your selected Currency. Pay attention to the currency sign nn the top right corner of the page. Price will be automatically converted to all available currencies on the market.
   
   e) Full Description is reserved for Introduction of Contents of the book.
   
   f) Bibliographic Description - Give a standard bibliographic description of the book:
   
      Author's Name, Title, Sub-Title. Edited or Translated by... Place: Publishing House, Series, Year of publication, Number of Pages.
   
   This information will appear in some of the listings and, what is more important, it will be used by Google as Description of the page in its search index. So this is the information potential buyers will see when searching the Web.
   
   g) Promo text - Short promotional description to appear on the Product page of the Book
   
   You’ll be able to edit the product properties later at any time. But never for all languages at once. When you click the Create button, the above descriptions can be changed and stay different for any language on the market, including the metadata.
   
   

      3. Some Important features and options don’t appear during product creation and are available only when you click the Create button.

1. 

The most important tabs here are the Shipping Properties where the weight and the format of the parcel should be entered, and the Features where a set of descriptors have to be entered. Some of them will serve as Filters when narrowing the results on the search pages.

 

Search first for available values and select one. If not present enter a new value in the adjacent field. If there are two authors to be entered, (1) enter the name of the first, (2) save the page, and (3) enter the name of the second. DO NOT translate the values - this will be done by the system editors.

 

For ISBN enter either 10 or 13-digit values, or both, saving them separately as already explained.

 

For Condition, use percent points:

• 95-100 - new, in perfect A condition.
• 80-94 - used, in excellent B condition.
• 50-79 - used, in good C condition.
• 20-49 - used, in acceptable D condition.

 

 

Adding Multiple Products

This option is open to use but not recommended, as you will have then to enter all descriptions for each language separately.

1. Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.

2. Click the gear button in the upper right part of the page and choose Bulk product addition.

   

3. Add products and fill in the empty fields.

   

4. Click Create.

Cloning a Product

If you plan to have several products with identical properties, you don’t need to create each of them manually. Instead of specifying the product properties each time that you add a new product, you can:

1. Set up one sample product with the common properties.

2. Clone the sample product.

3. Change the names and individual properties of the clone products.

   Starting with version 4.9.1, cloning a product doesn’t clone its reviews.

Editing Multiple Products at Once

You can edit the properties of a group of products.

1. Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.

2. Select the the products that you’d like to edit by clicking on them.

3. Click Edit selected above the list of products.

   

4. A pop-up window will open. Tick the checkboxes of the product properties you’d like to edit, then click Modify selected.

   Avoid choosing too many properties at once, or else it will be inconvenient to edit them all.

   

5. The selected products and their properties will appear on one page. Edit them, then click the Savebutton in the top right corner.

   Use Apply values to all the selected products in the upper left part of the page to update the value of the property for all the selected products at once.

   

Updating Prices and Stock for All Products

CS-Cart has a special page where you can update some properties all products at once. For example, you can increase the prices of all products by 10%, or increase the list price to display discount labels on all products.

To update all products:

1. In the administration panel, go to Products → Products.

2. Click the gear button in the upper right part of the page and choose Global update.

   

3. A new page will open. There you can update the following product properties:

   • Price
   • List price
   • In stock (the number of products in stock)
   • Price in points

   By default, the update is performed for all products. But if you use the Add product button, then the properties will be updated only for the selected products.

4. Once you’ve chosen how to update product properties, click Apply.

   

Importing Products

You can import (upload) products from a CSV file. CSV is a popular spreadsheet format. A line in a CSV file is one line of the table.

CSV files can be edited in spreadsheet editors such as LibreOffice Calc, OpenOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel. We recommend using LibreOffice (a free office suite) to edit CSV files.

To demonstrate the full process, let’s export one of the products to a CSV file first.

1. Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.

2. Select the products you’d like to export by clicking on them.

3. Choose Export selected in the Actions menu above the product list.

   

4. The Export data page will open. There you will be able to chose the exported fields and change export properties. Each exported field is an equivalent of a product property. We recommend that you leave everything as is for the first time. After everything is set up, click Export.

   

5. Open the exported file in the spreadsheet editor. The default delimiter for CSV is semicolon.

   

6. Each column of the table contains the specific type of the product data.

   The product is identified by the Product code; it means that:

   • All products must have unique product codes.
   • If a product code already exists in a database, the product with this code will be updated or replaced.
   • If the product doesn’t exist in a database, a new product will be created.

   When you import a product, some fields are required:

   • Product code

   • Language

   • Store—the storefront to which the product belongs.

   • Product name—the name of the product

   • Category—the category to which the product belongs

     If a category doesn’t exist in the database, it will be created. Use category delimiters to create a tree-like category structure and add a product to a specific subcategory.

   Other fields are optional. This time we recommend exporting only these required fields.

7. Use the sample product as an example and add new products to the table. Each line is a new product.

   

8. Save the file in the CSV format, and you’ll be able to import it.

Adding a Digital Product

CS-Cart allows to sell digital products.

1. Add a product.

2. Open the Files to sell tab on the product editing page.

   

3. Add the files that you want to sell. Files can be grouped by folders.

   

4. The additional properties are available for digital products on the General tab in the Extra section:

   • Downloadable—this checkbox is ticked automatically after the file is added to the product.
   • Enable shipping for downloadable products—if this checkbox is ticked, shipping costs will be calculated for this downloadable product just like for normal products.
   • Time-unlimited download—if this checkbox is ticked, the product download period never expires.
   

The digital product has been created. Create a test order and check the result.

If you uploaded a file for the downloadable product, there will be the Files tab on the product page on the storefront.

Once a digital product is purchased:

1. An email with the download link is sent to the customer.

2. The download link will become available on the order details page of the customer’s account.

   

3. All the purchased digital products will be available to the customer on the Downloads page of the customer’s account.

   

In the administration panel, orders with downloadable products will appear on a new tab called Downloads. There administrators can approve the download, prolong the download availability period, and check the number of downloads left.