Your product pages are arguably the most important pages on your website, and the quality of the content within these pages is critical to your store’s success.

Your Product Titles

Every product should feature descriptive and emotive titles. Unless your product identification codes (SKU, catalogue number, etc.) are a key feature in a product's marketing, do not include them within your titles.

Your Product Descriptions

Your product description text should be original and never copied from supplier or manufacturer websites at any time . Write informative descriptions that highlight your product's key features and benefits, and remember, it's not "War and Peace"! Consider using bullet points for important features, and bold type key pieces of information for the benefit of customers that skim through text.

Your Product Images

Your products should include more than one image/photo and be varied enough that little is left to a customer's imagination. Consider engaging a professional photographer with experience in product photography. The investment is worthwhile.

Add a Product to your Shop

To add a single product:

1. Go to My Shop
2. Select a category from the Categories pane 
3. Click the New Product button.
4. There are six tabs for you to enter product details, images and files, shipping and taxes, keywords and description, cross-sell links and options. See the next page for detailed instructions.
5. Click the Save Product button.

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General Product Information

The following section is a detailed focus on entering product information via the General navigation tab.

1. Go to My Shop
2. For a new product: Select a category from the Categories pane and click the New Product button.
3. To edit an existing product: Click on a category from the Categories pane to display its products in the Product Inventory pane on the right side of the page. Select a product to edit.
4. The General product Information tab is opened by default. Enter details as follows:

General Product Information

• Product Name:  Enter a descriptive keyword-rich name for the product. The name entered here is exactly what will appear in your shop.
• Product Link:  By default what you type into the Product Name field will appear automatically as your Product Link (URL). You can override the default by entering a URL that better describes your product. The URL must be unique and not used for any other product in your shop. Use a hyphen '-' to separate words; you must not use spaces when creating a URL.
• Product ID:  This is your company reference/product/catalogue number for the product.
• Status:  The default status is Available.  You may change the status at any time in the future by selecting Out of Stock,  Back-order,  Pre-order or Inactive.  Depending on your website preferences, each of these options may or may not appear in your shop. To choose whether these status are displayed in your shop or not, go to Preferences > Product Inventory
• Primary Price:  Enter the base value of the product. Any discounts, price varying options and tax rates will be applied to this amount.

Category

• Primary Category:  Select the major category that this product record will be found under.
• Secondary Categories:  Select up to two other categories if you would like the product to across multiple categories.

Product Description

• Short Description:  Enter a succinct, emotive phrase about the product to entice visitors to click on the product from the product category page. The description will appear near the thumbnail (small image) of the product when customers search for the item.
• Long Description:  Enter a long description to this field to appear on the product page for this item. Refer to Chapter 2, Section 3 for detailed information about the Content Editor ).
• Extra Fields:  If you added your own custom fields in Preferences > Product Inventory they will appear here. Enter in the relevant information for the extra fields.
• Product Flags:   You can visually flag products with an icon stating that a product is either 'New', 'On Sale' or 'Featured'. Flags are visible to customers when viewing the shop category in which the product is presented. An end-date determines each flag’s promotion period. At the end of your promotion's expiry period, the Product Flag will disappear. See Your Shopfront for more about Product Flags and how they control what appears in your Shopfront page.

1. Click Save Changes when finished.

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Using Promotional Product Flags

Product Flags are designed to promote products in your shop by placing a visual flag over a product's thumbnail image in your shop’s category and Shopfront display. This allows flagged products to stand out from other products displayed on a page. There are three Product Flags available: “On Sale”, “Featured” and “New”.

To assign a product flag to a product:

1. Go to My Shop to view which products are already flagged within your Product Inventory list. There are no limits to the number of products able to display a Product Flag although only one flag can be assigned to each product at a time. To assign a promotion Product Flag to any product, open a product:
2. From the Product Flags section on the product’s General page, click into the text input field relevant to the promotion you want to apply and enter the end-date for the promotion. Alternatively, click the red calendar icon and select the promotion end-date that way.
3. Click the Save Changes button to activate the promotion flag for the product in your shop’s category display and Shopfront display 

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Create an automatically-styled Image Gallery for a Product

Each product can have any number of images associated with it. The first image can appear as a thumbnail on the category page as well as a large image on the product page. All subsequent images will appear within the product’s gallery, also displayed on the product’s page.

All My Shop images are automatically resized according to the dimensions entered into the Design > Categories / Shop View preferences. Those settings can be changed at any time. Images must be .jpg, .gif or .png format only .

1. Go to My Shop

• For a new product:  Click the New Product button after selecting a shop category.
• To edit an existing product:  Click on a category from the Categories pane to display its products in the Product Inventory pane on the right side of the page.

1. With the product editor now open, click the Images and Files navigation tab 
2. Existing gallery images will be displayed. To upload or select a new image for the product’s gallery, click the Browse button. The Product Images pop-up window will appear.
3. Available Images will be displayed. If the image has already been uploaded, select it from the available list now. Otherwise, click the Choose Files button and browse your computer to select a new image. Once found, click the Open button. The new image’s filename will now appear next to the Choose Files button.
4. Click the Upload button. The name of the image will now appear in the Product Images folder and a preview of the image will be displayed.
5. Click the Use Image button. The name of the image will now appear in the Add Image text field.

• Title:  Write a title to assist search engines in finding your images. When visitors hover over the image in your shop, the title will appear in a pop-up text bubble.
• Description:  Enter a specific description of the image.  This will exist as Meta data on the web page. It will only be visible if visitor's browsers are set to ‘not display images'. It allows vision impaired visitors to hear a description of the image and it also assists search engines to find your products.
• Sort Order:  If you elect to display more than one image per product (recommended), you can set the order in which images appear on the product page by placing a number in this field. Lowest numbers appear first (i.e. an image with a sort order number 1 will appear first).

1. Click the Save Product button.
2. Publish your website to send the new images live to the Internet.

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Shipping & Tax product information

For each product in your shop you can set the shipping rate of the item, enter important postal details or exempt the item from tax or shipping altogether. 

1. Go to My Shop

• For a new product:  Click the New Product button after selecting a shop category.
• To edit an existing product:  Click on a category from the Categories pane to display its products in the Product Inventory pane on the right side of the page.

1. Click the Shipping & Taxes navigation tab 

• Free Shipping?"  Place a tick in this box to exempt this item from global shipping charges.
• Physical Dimensions:  Each field must be completed to calculate the cost of shipping if your global shipping options are set to Australia Post or Rate by weight.
• Handling cost per item:  Enter a dollar value to set the handling charge for this product. This charge will be applied for each multiple of the particular item that is item purchased.
• Apply GST:  Place a tick in the box to calculate GST on the shipping charge. Remove the tick if the product should be exempt from GST.

1. Click the Save Product button.

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Can I upload multiple products to My Shop at once? (eCommerce packages only)

You can upload multiple products to your shop at once. It requires that you export and upload a .csv file with all of your product details. See the this  related article  for more information.

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My Shopfront products have disappeared. What happened?

It is likely that your products were using the  Product Flags  promotion feature and the promotion end-date has expired. To automatically have your Shopfront "call up" those products again, move each product's promotion end-date ahead. To prevent this happening in future, closely monitor a product's promotion end-date or record end-dates in a suitable spreadsheet such as MS Excel®, etc.

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