The Add Products Wizard offers you a simplified means to quickly add most products to your store. The Add Products Wizard is ideal for new merchants looking to add products to your site and even has some distinct benefits over adding products through the Catalog Manager. The Add Product Wizards allows you to:

• select whether a product will be displayed as a special on your home page
• add options and incremental pricing without needing to know the proper syntax
• assign new products to a category (section) and even create a category (section) page
• review and edit your product information before committing the data to your store

The Add Products Wizards is accessible from the Open for Business control panel by clicking the Add Products link. You can continue to use the wizard after opening for business by clicking on the Add Products Wizard link from the Store Manager.

The Add Products Intro page provides access to start the wizard. It also outlines the tasks and time needed to complete those tasks in this step of the Open for Business process.

Note: Merchants with a large number of products, especially if formatted in a database or spreadsheet, should consider using the Database Upload functionality rather than adding products one at a time. While the database upload is more complicated and does require formatting the upload file correctly, uploading your products in a spreadsheet can be a major time saver. Learn more.

After clicking Start Adding Products, you will be taken to the Add Product Info page where you will enter product and pricing information.

From this page you can do the following:

• add a product name (also used as the page name and default page title)
• add a product description (also used as the default page meta-description)
• upload a product image (gif or jpeg only)
• enter a price (required) and a sale price (if applicable)
• enter a shipping weight (required if your shipping rates are calculated based on weight). Enter 0 if the field is required but the product has no shipping weight.
• select to add the product as a featured product (special) to your home page

You will then continue on to adding product options (if applicable).

Product options are not necessary for many products. You would need product options whenever you wish to show one product but offer some variations. For example, if you had an apparel store selling t-shits with a particular design on the front, you would use options if you offered that t-shirt in different colors (red, green, blue) or different sizes (small, medium, large).

If you do not need options for your product, you can continue to the next step. If you do need options, you can select the radio button to create options, and then click the create option button. You can then supply the name for the option (Size, Color) and add values (small, medium, large).

After adding any product options you can choose where to assign your products. All products need to have a place in your store. Where you add products determines where products display for buyers visiting your store and where links to those products appear.

You can choose to

• Add the product to your home page (not recommended for most stores). Adding to home will add a link to the product in the navigation section of your store pages.
• Add a product to an existing category (section). For new merchants just starting the Add Product Wizard, you store will not have any categories.
• Create a category (section) or sub-category.

Note: The Add Product Wizard only displays and allows you to create categories three levels deep (for example Men's > Men's shirts > Men's dress shirts > Products). If you need to create a store with more than 3 levels of categories, you will need to do so directly in the Store Editor.

After assigning your product to a category, you can then review and edit your product(s) and categories. Note: Only products and categories created in this session of the Add Products Wizard will be displayed. A session consists of all products and categories created in the wizard until you finish.

From the Review page you can edit the products you are about to add as well as the categories you are creating.

Note: Your products and categories are not added until you reach the Finish page of the wizard. You can exit the wizard and return at any time to continue adding products but your products are not added to your store until you see the finish page.

See Also

• Creating monograms and inscriptions
• Setting up quantity pricing
• Catalog Manager help
• Database Upload help for Store Editor
• Database Upload help for Catalog Manager