What can you sell
Yes, you can argue, that any shop should be able to sell one particular piece of clothing in several sizes and colors or dietary supplements of many flavors. The question is, how does a particular system manage these product varieties and how well is it digested by the customer in the end?
Where does the heart of the problem lie?
Imagine you run an e-business solution that is not very intelligent or advanced and you sell safety products and equipment. Take a regular safety hard hat for instance. You have this hat currently in three sizes and four colors in your stock, which is all together 12 varieties. If you take all combinations and display them on your store, the same hard hat is displayed 12 times, one below another. The same price and probably the same picture are displayed with the same description.
This is a good example of the above mentioned problem as this form of product presentation could be considered as customer unfriendly. One hard hat covers more than three quarters of the page and the rest is occupied e.g. by a highly visible vest in eight colors and size combinations. A disappointed customer will only see two products on the whole page!
How does FastCentrik solve this problem?
FastCentrik has an elegant and simple solution. The system allows a structured parametric product description. This means that products in administration could be described not only by plain text (name and description) but also by two types of parameters as listed below:
- Optional - any chosen parameter and its value could be assigned to the product. The parameter could be, for example, a color which can take a value such as blue, red or yellow, etc.
- Non-optional - these are parameters displayed on the shop, and with a particular product, they only take one simple informative value, such as "Suitable for kids under 3 years", "Consumption" or "Power class", etc.
When creating a product card in the system administration you can create all offered varieties by using the optional parameters on one card.
The hard hat comes in different sizes and colors so the size and color parameters could be used in this case. On the other hand, the color parameter is used for a pram that comes in different colors but only one size. Thanks to this a product with any number of parameters will be seen on the shop just once and the shoppers will only be able to choose from the parameters you have presented. A confirmation e-mail is sent to the customer after an order is created. This e-mail contains not only the chosen product and its code, but also all the selected varieties (size, color, type of print, etc.)
