Multiple Categories

[justinhill]

One thing I'm missing from Marketworks is the way it assigned products to categories. In Actinic, I create a category e.g. 'iPod Accessories' and then put a product in it e.g. 'Speaker/Dock'. But suppose I have another category called 'Audio/Speakers'. If I have a product which is a multimedia speaker system it's potentially applicable to both categories. in Marketworks, you create as many categories as you want, one one 'side', then create your products on the other 'side'. Each product is then assigned to one or more catgegories.

So, 'JBL Multimedia Speakers' appears in 'iPod Accessories', 'Audio/Speakers', 'JBL' and maybe 'Special Offers'. Can I do this with Actinic already (in which case whoops) or not?

[PaulGrimshaw]

you create one product and then copy it into each section as you see fit using duplicates, but like you, this isnt a great result for me. I have products I want to appear in one location, and then another (by brand) and then a vase might be in homeware and glassware etc etc.

this is the only real major bug bear for me with actinic. At the moment where the product is located in the tree is where the product appears, but personally, I think there should be one tree for tracking products (so therefore just one item, no duplicates) and another tree for designing the category layout and then you just use the product itself to link the two up.

in tree:

JBL
-- Speakers
--- JBL Multimedia Speakers (Pack A)
--- JBL Multimedia Speakers (Pack B)
--- JBL Multimedia Speakers (Pack C)

in the products you would tick as many cats as you see fit ...

If this is the sort of thing you want add your vote here: http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=26895



thanks,
Paul.

[stopfordian]

A vote for this from me

It is time consuming to have to create duplicates to put a product in several sections, so I generally don't bother. The ability to create a product list and a section list seperately and then link the two together would be great.

[cdicken]

Thanks for the suggestion here. I have passed this on to the development team.

[Jan]

You can use searchable properties to do this - basically, instead of using product groups, define a property for each search term and assign yes or no to it (or use a checkbox if you can), mark the property as being searchable and then in the advanced search page they can select the categories/properties they are interested in and search away.

Regards,

[brian.mc]

Add my vote for this one too!

[Stereo Steve]

Jan, thats OK but the search result has no add to cart and also on our site appears ex VAT (other sites appear inc VAT but nobody seems to know why!).

I would also love this as duplicates are very hard to manage.

All we really need is add to cart on the search page, then we can assign variables like brand, size , speed, colour etc and produce a URL for that search result.

Of course, it would look tidier if the URL was www.site.co.uk/blue_widgets

[Stereo Steve]

IN fact, would it be possible to create a page called the above where search results were generated and displayed as a product page with add to cart? That would be a killer feature in my view.

So you might create a page called www.site.co.uk/blue_widgets and then be able to set that so that only the products with the variable values of blue and widget were displayed?

Would be a massive plus I think. Surely the software could generate these on upload as static HTML?

[Stereo Steve]

Or, could a third party app be created to create such pages in actinic which you could run before each upload. Would mean a lot of constantly changing pages as well which would be great for SEO.

[justinhill]

All good stuff.

But... it's the way my mind works (or perhaps how it's been trained to work by using Marketworks). What I'm thinking about is fundementally different from Actinic as it stands.

It's about splitting the 'inventory' - item descriptions, inages, properties like price, weight etc - away from the section stuff altogether, and only bringing them together at upload time.

Not wanting to get into murky water, but Marketworks is able to combine being a website generating thing with being an eBay launching thing by having effectively two systems - storefront and bulk lister respectively - sharing access to common inventory records. On the other hand, Marketworks users sacrifice a fair amount of fine control of appearence for this facility, which is what brought me to Actinic in the first place....

[Stereo Steve]

Interesting. There is defiantely some ground for Actinic to make up here. How it's done is another matter. I think it should stick with static HTML for this functionality and have the software generate pages as required. How possible this is, is another matter.

I would love to give items a brand variable for one and be able to create a page called www.site.co.uk/thebrand and have actinic create this page offline for when I upload. Even if it was a process that had to be instigated manually (to avoid slow uploads).

Surely would be a real winner with SEO as these pages would constantly change as you added and removed products from sale.