Categories as Products

[dcox]

I think it would be cool to have the categories appear to be product pages with a lot of product options as an option. My site is setup such that many of the products technically listed on a category page with a list of products. This keeps me from putting the same product description in over and over again for similar products. The problem comes in when I have a main category that have products and "sub categories" that are being treated as products. It lists the separately on the main category page.

The solution would be to treat the sub-category page as a product page, or, give more advanced product option features that would allow the products to be listed like I have them on my category pages. For it to work though, each product needs to be assigned its own price, item #, etc.

Just a thought...

[onering]

We would definitely be able to take advantage of this feature if it existed. Our "products" are actually category pages with as many as 50 individual sizes (products).

[GonzaloGil]

Its not going to ever be possible to have categories and products display the same way. It doesn't make sence to treat a category as a product. However, changes to the product database may allow you to have a product, which has sub-products attached, and so you would have what you need. You could do it right now if you wanted by using the related items, then changing the template so related items display similarly as they display now on your category pages.

[dcox]

Hmm,

Now you have me thinking... How hard would it be to convert my site to the setup you mentioned Gonzalo? I like the sound of it. Take a look at this page: Leupold VX-III. How would I relate all of the products on that page such that if any single product in that list was found via a search (internal or search engine) it would display the layout you see in the example?

Currently, if you search for say "TOLP57700" it brings up a not so good looking page b/c I have no information for the individual product, just the generic description you see in the above example. I am conserned that google and other search engines may see these individual product pages and direct people directly to them rather than the category page I want them to look at.

----edited----
Here are the things that I can think of that may cause a problem with just using related products:
1. One of the product names would be displayed at the top of the page, rather than just Leupold VX-III or whatever?
2. How would you display real related products if you wanted?
3. The long description would have to be put in for every product (even though its the same) which will run the DB size up

These problems could be fixed pretty easily I think though in a new version release. I am not a programmer, but it seems that you could use the same format as a related product with a few changes to fix the above problems. It could be considered one of the advanced features.

My vote is for something along those lines in an upcoming release. I know it isn't the highest on the priority list, but I think a lot of people would use it more than expected if they realize the option is available to them. It would be an option that no other cart has as far as I know (and I know more about this layout than anything else about ecommerce since my primary goal in selecting a cart was this layout)
----edited----

-dcox

[onering]

Now you have me thinking too....

Originally Posted by dcox

I am conserned that google and other search engines may see these individual product pages and direct people directly to them rather than the category page I want them to look at.

This happens pretty routinlely with the listings on our MC site. The product model is the catefory page with some general info about the prod. and the individual size product pages are linked to the category pages using DHTML dropdowns. I think that this doesn't help matters. On our new 3DC site, i'm going to put the individual sizes in with text links and we'll see what happens.

Originally Posted by dcox

Here are the things that I can think of that may cause a problem with just using related products:
1. One of the product names would be displayed at the top of the page, rather than just Leupold VX-III or whatever?

You would have to give the lead product a generic titile and then there would need to be a way to make the lead product unorderable. I was thinking initally that you could make it 'out of stock' but this would then still show the 'out of stock' header for the lead product and make the customer think that the entire product line was out of stock (unless you turned off inventory tracking for everything)

Originally Posted by dcox

3. The long description would have to be put in for every product (even though its the same) which will run the DB size up

This is what we are now doing on our new site. We have product long descriptions for many of our 400+ products and we are barely using 1/8th of the database size. Our category pages will be general info and product images with text links to each individual size. One way that we have managed to keep the description size down on the product pages has been by building all of the formatting, etc. into the listing template. Each product has a table of critical dimensions and some text and titles. The tables and titles are all formatted at the template level and the values for the tables come from the extra database fields. This lets us keep the long description limited to just plain text, not to mention reduces the amount of maintanence required when making site-wide cosmetic changes.

[dcox]

One ring,

For your discriptions, do you have any bulleted lists or any "special" formatting like that? The problem I have with just putting plain text into the spreadsheet is it won't allow paragraph breaks or lists. My product database is already 2163 products, and I plan to add many many more as I get time. That is why I am conserned about DB size.

Thanks.

[onering]

Originally Posted by dcox

One ring,

For your discriptions, do you have any bulleted lists or any "special" formatting like that? The problem I have with just putting plain text into the spreadsheet is it won't allow paragraph breaks or lists. My product database is already 2163 products, and I plan to add many many more as I get time. That is why I am conserned about DB size.

Thanks.

Wow! You do have alot of products. I can understand your concern about data base size. I guess my statement about plain text was a bit misleading. I will throw in an occasional break or a quick font change here and there. But, that aside, I have all of the formatting done in the template. I do use bulleted lists as well. I enter the individual lines as plain text in the 'product features' field in the product editor. Then, the list itself is formatted using tables and CSS on the listing_0 template. Here's an example: PRODUCT PAGE. The only coding that I have done within the descriptions themselves was to add a break line and change the color of the font for the warning at the bottom of the long desc.

[dcox]

Onering,

I really like your site a lot. And, I can definatly see the similarities to your listing requirements and mine. Hopefully Gonzalo or Jimmy will keep an eye on this thread. I don't have a clue to do programming, but itll be awesome if they are able to figure something out for a release down the road...

On another note, do you have all of your tires listed on that site? I'll be looking for some Goodyear or BFG 34-35" max traction tires pretty soon!

[onering]

Dcox, I sent you a pm.

[GonzaloGil]

2.1 is virtually done, so there wont be a feature to help on this issue on this new update. However, for the next update, we wanted to include a feature which would allow you to link products together, so that, you could have

Product A (Lets call it, Table)
With multiple products

- Metal table
- Wood table
- Plastic table

Attached.

Customer would then make the selection. A more info button could be available so that when Metal table is selected, you can see details specific to metal table. And whichever you select, thats the one that gets added to cart.