Understanding Products
The products component of Synergy 8 consists of four elements:
1. Products
2. Product Categories
3. Product Brands
4. Inventory Items
What is a Product?
Products are the individual items or services that your customers will be purchasing. An example of a product might be a bouquet of flowers, a guitar starter pack (consisting of a number of inventory items), an e-book, a ticket to an event, or a donation.
When you create a new product you will be asked to provide details such as:
- Title
- Price
- Image
- Whether the product will need to be shipped
- A detailed overview of the product
What is a Product Category?
Product categories are used to display and organize similar products on your website. An example of a product category might be "laptops", "event tickets", or "guitars"
A product must be assigned to at least one product category. You can assign a product to more than one category.
What is a Product Brand?
Product brands are another method of organizing and displaying products on your website. Products are sorted into product categories, and then into individual brands depending on their manufacturer. Using the laptop store example, you might have the brands Sony, Toshiba, or Apple.
Each product must be associated with exactly one brand.
If brands aren't really appropriate to your business or online store, a standard practice is to create a brand using the title of your business. Using an example of a Floris, you may only have one brand
What are Inventory Items?
Inventory is useful for managing and monitoring your stock levels. If you don't need to monitor inventory levels, there is no need to use the inventory functionality of Synergy 8.
A good example of using the inventory component efficiently would be:
A guitar package that contains a guitar, speaker and cables. The "guitar package" is setup as a product. The guitar package product is then linked to each inventory item (guitar, speaker and cable) so that each time the complete package is sold, the stock levels of each of the inventory items will be decremented.
Where to next?
To get started populating your product catalog, first you'll need to create product categories and brands for keeping your products sorted.