eCommerce: Exciting Product Attribute Improvements

11-Jan-2009   -

We've made some exciting new improvements to Product Attributes. Unlike Product Grouping where each item in the group is a different product, product attributes are a way of adding meta information to any product at the time of the purchase. For example if you are selling a Sofa and you'd like the customer to choose the stitching style, color and leather type, then you would use product attributes. Such attributes may not necessarily represent different products, but are important to the final product being purchased. The improvements we've made in this area include:

• Ability to set a price for each attribute. This means in addition to the product price, each attribute can have its own price which gets added to the product price if selected
• Ability to display attributes as checkboxes (allows for multiple attributes to be selected), radio list and drop down. Previously you could only display them in drop down format
• Ability to specify an image for each attribute

In the longer term we will also allow attributes to be displayed in textbox format. This will come in handy if you are selling products such as curtains. For example if you sell curtains by the meter, the customer will be able to enter the number of meters and have that multiplied by the attribute price to calculate the total price of that product.

To utilize this feature please download the latest Product Import Template file from Admin->Imports to learn more about how to enter information in the import file and/or the Admin interface to specify this extra information. We will be enhancing the interface in the Admin in the coming weeks to allow you to enter attribute information much more easily. We hope you enjoy these new improvements.

---