Showing New Products for Multiple Sections

[Mazydizzle]

Hi all,

do you know if it is possible to have the new products block in the brochure homepage to display new products from different sections rather than the top 6 from all new products.

So...

Newproducts for Section 1
New products for section 2

etc...?

[leehack]

If you open up the list, select how many you want in the list, then towards the bottom of the window, select the products you want in the lists and select 'lock'. You then have the products you want in the list.

[Mazydizzle]

seperate lists for each section

Hi Lee,

I understand that I can add to the current list. but what I really wanted to do is have a "New Products" list for each section.

Is that possible do you think?

Mario

[leehack]

Not as standard no, it is possible, you'd need extensive actinic, html and css experience to do it though. Took me 2 months to perfect it, so you can have any product in any titled list on any page, it's a big job though and certainly not cheap.

The marketing lists are limited to 20 products each, so unless you have very few sections or wanted to only show 1 or 2 products in each list, they are largely unusable for what you want to do.

Typical example on a site where i have added it - http://www.clubhousegolf.co.uk/acatalog/Drivers.html - special offers and best sellers (in the central area) are products they add in themselves.

[Mazydizzle]

yeah I basically have, say, 5 sections.. and I want a best seller /New product list, displaying 3 - 6 products for each particular section.

do you know where i could start reading about CSS to get a good understanding about customising actinic?

I understand that I cannot get this kinda thing done for free but I would much rather try and learn it myself than pay someone a lot of money to do it.

any pointers greatly appreciated.

mario

[leehack]

If you limited yourself to 4 per section, you'd have 5 sections of 4 products, thus 20 used and could use the actinic standard lists by splitting them up. You'd just need to understand blockifs then mainly, details on splitting the marketing lists up into banks of products is in the KB.

If you want the more flexible approach, Google will point you to a host of CSS tutorials, try those first, then you will need the html tutorials and then the actinic ones, learn a bit of php too - you should have that nailed in about 18 months of solidly learning them.

[JimboS]

Lee

Do I read this right, you have a way of creating new products and best sellers by catalogue section?

So If I have 5 sections each with diferent product in, you could give me the top 5 or even 10 best sellers and new products in each section and that this would dynmaically change as orders are placed?

James

[leehack]

Lee

Do I read this right, you have a way of creating new products and best sellers by catalogue section?

So If I have 5 sections each with diferent product in, you could give me the top 5 or even 10 best sellers and new products in each section and that this would dynmaically change as orders are placed?

James

Hi James

They're not exclusively new products or best sellers, they're completely customisable on a per section basis, ie you choose the title for each list. In simple terms you choose whether you want the lists to be 'top only', 'top and bottom' or 'none' (none is standard). There is a standard title put in that the list takes if you do not add one in, otherwise you title each list as you want to.

If you look at these 2 pages - http://www.clubhousegolf.co.uk/acatalog/Drivers.html and http://www.clubhousegolf.co.uk/acata...ay_Metals.html - you can see the bottom list has a different title on each of them, one tailored to the products/section in it. The top list is just taking the standard entry on most pages, but on here for example - http://www.clubhousegolf.co.uk/acatalog/Shirts.html - it's again tailored to suit the products.

The lists are not automatically created, you put the products into them yourself using the duplicate product facility in actinic. The second part to the addon is what makes that product then link to its master page, without going through the cgi-bin, which is much better for internal linking. So on a page like this - http://www.clubhousegolf.co.uk/acata...se_Layers.html - they've added 8 duplicate products to the section, selected 'top and bottom' for list locations and input the name of the lists (if not standard). The addon does the rest.

[JimboS]

Sounds interesting and looks good, wish Actinic would implement something like this.

If you could group product by category (separate to the way discounts are done – would a custom variable do this?) and then best sellers and new products were created either for the whole store or by category.

You could then specify which category each section contained and create a best seller list for those products. Much more meaningful for the visitor, especially on a store with a wide range of different products.

Sounds simple but I am sure it isn’t – anyone got a plug in that already does this?

James

[leehack]

To have functionality to set products into categories and then have marketing lists run on those categories and place relevant lists on page is a pipe dream i'm afraid. There are so many avenues that would need completing to do that, it will never be viable as far as i am concerned, certainly not in the current structure.

I can see what you mean that if you have say 5 (lets keep it small for ease) sections of products, each section has ten products in it, so 50 products in total. You'd log each product into a category and then on the section pages specify that you'd like new products and best sellers from the specific category to show on the specific category page.

With 5 section and just 50 products, that sounds sensible, multiply that for a site with a few thousand products and the processing multiplies exponentially and without doubt would grind actinic to a halt, you simply won't get an access database able to process so much whilst also processing everything else for the site.

There's certainly no addon for anything like that, to be frank my solution is the only one that i know will do custom marketing lists on any page and although as automated as i can get it, you still have to manually complete the product additions.

You could run your own best seller reports on products, produce lists and update products via an import with correct flags (variables) set against them, specifiying what they are, ie best seller for section 12. I could then create lists that read those flags and include them into the relevant lists automatically, but the processing would soon fall down, its just too immense to cycle through a complete product list for each section each time, great for a site with 100 products, goodnight to one with any more.

This site was launched today, it still has some areas to be completed, but it's not far off now - http://www.blokesbags.co.uk/index.html - you can see it has normal departments and then has a shop by price drop down jump list, the by price sections are all duplicates that link back to their master page.

I can create auto sections by price and provide custom marketing lists for you to add on any page, but you have to add the products manually, like you do with related products in fact (it's just much quicker as its a copy paste instead). Fully auto lists, section specific running on creation date or sales data is just not possible though i'm afraid.

[JimboS]

Thanks for the info, sound like I better start praying for a miracle.

Will give you options some thoiught.

James

[Mazydizzle]

Hi Lee,

going back to my original post, if you were to apply the same system but only to New Products recently added, would actinic be able to handle that processing?

Say I wanted the homepage to display the 5 newest products from every section? Would you be able to do that kind of thing?

Mario

[leehack]

It's possible Mazy, but you wouldn't want to pay the price to have it built. The problem with things like this is the amount of time these things take to create, when its for a one off application, you end up paying for the full development cost. In contrast, a widely used addon you create, has its development cost shared across multiple people and so is vastly cheaper.

There are other things to consider such as let's say for example you add 10 new products into a section, how do you decide which of those 10 are to be included, I'd have a global rule on the 5 latest, but you might decide that you'd prefer new products 6 and 7 to be included instead, so you then not only have global rules to follow, you also need specifically customisable product lists too.

Unless you have an inordinate amount of new products going on weekly, I don't think its even worth considering tbh. To add a product to a list is just a few seconds, counter that against hours of development time to pay for. I could probably maintain your lists monthly on a manual basis for 2 years, for cheaper than it would cost to create the auto solution.