THIS IS A TEST INSTANCE. ALL YOUR CHANGES WILL BE LOST!!!!
What are 'Products'?
Products screen (1st screen)
Products are items which are available for sale. They can have names, descriptions, pictures, and prices associated with them. There are several major types of products:
Digital goods, such as downloadable music or movies, which do not require tracking inventory.
Physical items, such as books or medium white shirts, that could require tracking inventory.
Virtual items, such as a shirt. They are NOT counted in inventory.
Stand-Alone Products are products existing as an identifiable item, not the master virtual 'shirt' with various sizes and colors. They are counted in inventory.
Note on Virtual Products
A shirt is not a physical item in the sense that one does not actually buy or sell a shirt — one buys medium shirts in white, large shirts in blue, and so forth. Virtual items such as 'a shirt' point to any number of physical items that are bought and sold and make it easier to organize products for sale. For example, instead of showing the customer a laundry list of all possible sizes and colors of shirts, we can show the customer a shirt item and ask her to choose the size and color she wants. Then we add that particular shirt to her order. Virtual items do not have any inventory associated with them.
Next set of Tabs
Once you have selected a product to edit or have selected to create a new product, you will see a series of tabs: Product, Prices, Content, IDs, Categories, Keywords, Associations, Attributes, Features, Facilities, Locations, Inventory, Suppliers, Accounts.
Duplicating products
At the bottom of the main Product tab is a small menu for duplicating products. This is a very useful feature when creating a lot of products with similar characteristics. Enter a new product ID here, and the catalog manager would take the current product and create a copy of it with the new product ID.
Options with Duplicate Products
There are two rows of options below the product ID, one starting with 'Duplicate' and one with 'Remove.' A click on a box next to an option will cause the selected characteristics of products to be duplicated as well. For example:
Click on the box to the right of 'Prices' and the product will be duplicated with all the same price data as the original.
Click on a box next to an option in the 'Remove' row and that characteristic of the original product will not be in the new product when created.
Virtual and Variant Products
A virtual product, as described above, is a product which has several selectable features, each of which resolves to an actual product. A virtual product cannot be added to a shopping cart or order. If a product is defined as a variant, services such as those for calculating product pricing will look to the parent product.
Pricing
Flexible Pricing Model
Open for Business has an extremely flexible product pricing model that is based on a combination of data and rules. The most basic information is maintained under the 'Price' tab for a product. Here, one can enter Default Price, List Price, Promotional Price, Average Cost of a product.
Required Prices
The only REQUIRED prices are List Price and Default Price. You could have a price at which it is bought (Average Cost) and a price at which it is sold (List Price). List price can be used as Suggested Retail price and Default price would be the price which you will sell it for (by default).
Price Information and Actual Prices
Each piece of price information specifies what type of price it is (List Price, Promotional Price, Average Cost); the currency it is in; the product store group it belongs to; and the from and through dates of this price. Once Open for Business has all the price information for a product, it will use a service called calculateProductPrice to determine the actual price of a particular product.
Price Component Functions
Pricing in Open for Business is very flexible and much more robust than simpler systems that function off one or two price inputs. Instead, the price of an item is a function of:
Price information input on this page
Pricing rules for this product store
Promotions currently active for this store.
How Price is Calculated
Multiple Store Groups?
If multiple product store groups are defined, the price returned will be for the product store group of the current product store. This makes it possible to create different prices for different stores, such as one targeted to retail consumers and one targeted to wholesale business-to-business (b2b) customers.
Price Rules
If there is a list price, then price rules are used for this product. Price rules are based on all the price information available, including default price, list price, promotional price, and average cost. Open for business will run through all the price rules available to look for applicable rules and use them to determine the price of the item. If no price rules are applicable, it will first try to use a default price as the final price. If there is no default price, it will try to use the list price. If neither default nor list price is available and there are no applicable price rules, it will return a price of zero.
No List Price?
If there is no list price, then no price rules will be run for the product. The default price will be returned as the price for the product. In addition, competitive price and average cost will be returned as additional available information, in case the calling application uses it.
Max/ Min Prices
In all cases, the price will be constrained by the maximum and minimum price.
Multiple List Prices?
If there are multiple prices which are applicable at any time, such as two list prices, the first one fetched from the database will be used. This may lead to unintended effects.
System Performance Cost
Price rules create a tremendous amount of flexibility in defining prices, but they have a performance cost. On a 2.4 GHz single CPU Pentium machine, using price rules takes approximately 0.05 seconds longer for the same product. Thus, a page which has twenty products will take one second longer.
Variant Prices
It is not necessary for a product variant to have prices entered. Open for Business will automatically look up the price of the parent virtual item if the variant product does not have product prices.
Content
Product Content Tab
The Product Content tab is for creating and maintaining content information about a product, such as product name, descriptions, and images. The first menu is used to create a new content of a certain type for the product. The second menu is for adding an existing content (using a content ID) to this product. Both of these use the content management system for creating and maintaining content information.
Override Simple Fields
Below these two menus is a section called 'override simple fields.' This is where you can still enter content information that is stored directly with the product, rather than maintained by the content manager. If there is product content information in these fields, they will take precedence over what is available from the content manager.
Upload Image Tool
Further enhancement is provided with the Upload Image tool which allows you to specify the appearance size of a selected image at viewing.
Geos
IDs - Product ID Codes
Product ID codes can be used to associate additional identification numbers to a product, such as UPC codes or ISBN codes. A product can then be found using these identification numbers as well as its Open for Business product ID.
Categories
This tab allows you to add a product to different product categories. The sequence number is used to order the products in the category.
Keywords
This shows what keywords are associated with this product. Keywords are used for search functions in the catalog manager and in order and ecommerce functions. Each keyword has a weight associated with it. You can use it to add or remove keywords.
Associations
This tab shows the products associated with the current one and provides a menu for adding additional product associations. Typical product associations include the following.
Product variant
One product is a variant of another, based on features selected. Usually, the variant product (product ID to) is a physical manifestation of a virtual product (product ID from.)
Complementary, upgrade, or replacement
Define products which are, respectively, cross-sells, up-sells, or replacements for another product.
Marketing package component
One product (product ID to) is used to create a marketing package (product ID from.) An example of a marketing package is a gift basket, composed of different products which may themselves be salable.
Bill of Materials
Defines a relationship where one product is used to manufacture another one (more on this in the manufacturing component.)
Manufacturing
Costs
Attributes
Define and assign product attributes here to help differentiate between your products.
Features
Shows what product features are associated with this product, and the form of their association. A feature can be applied in the following manners: standard, selectable (choose one from many features of this type), distinguishing, optional, required. Each feature has a sequence number and an amount field. You can use this page to add features from feature categories, using their ID codes, or their feature IDs.
You defines features and features categories using the Features menu right after the Main menu of the Catalog Manager Application.
Facilities
A facility is analogous to a warehouse and is used to store inventory. This tab specifies the physical warehouse locations where this product will be kept, what the minimum reorder quantities are at this warehouse location, and how many days it takes to ship from this warehouse.
Locations
Defines specific location within a facility. For example, which aisle, what shelf, a bin number, etc., can be reserved specifically for a specific product ID. When various inventory IDs have the same product IDs, this enables quick location of product among the various possible locations.
Inventory
Top Portion
This tab gives a breakdown of actual inventory for the product. The top portion will show a summary of how much inventory in total is available for this product, including both total quantity on hand (QOH), available to promise (ATP), and inventory on incoming shipments. QOH includes inventory which is still in the warehouse but has already been sold and is awaiting shipment. ATP is only inventory which is still available for future orders.
Bottom Portion
The bottom portion of this screen will show actual line items of inventory associated with this product, such as individual orders, shipments, and receipts.
Suppliers
This tab specifies basic information for ordering the product from suppliers. The party ID is a drop-down menu of available suppliers for this product. (For a supplier to show up in this menu, it needs to be created in the party manager and have a role of 'Supplier.') For each supplier, you can specify the minimum order quantity, order increment, lead time, price (last price), a name, and a product ID.
Agreements
Accounts
Specifies what General Ledger (GL accounts) should be used for this Sales, Cost of Goods Sold, and Inventory accounts. This allows different GL accounts to be used for different products, breaking out financial accounting as needed.
Variants
Virtual Products Only
If the product is a virtual product, there should also be a 'Variants' tab. This page is laid out in columns, with each product feature type (ie, size, color) taking up a separate column and each feature value taking up a row. It will show all possible combinations of product features for this virtual product. For each combination, it will show the product variants which exist for this combination of features. If you click on the small box to the far right, it will auto-generate a product ID for this particular variant, using the idCode field of each product feature.
Multiple Variant Products?
It usually is a problem if a product has more than one variant product for a particular feature combination. An order-taking or ecommerce applications may not be able to resolve which product it should use when a user selects that particular combination and thus will cause an exception.