Symphony.

I’m relaunching a site of mine which is an online apparel shop. I’m not convinced that the way I have it currently setup is the best approach and would love everybody’s input.

Before I throw my ideas and current set up, how would you go about setting it up? Or how have you set up an online store?

I’m only referring to storing the product data in sections. How many? What fields? Forget shopping cart, shipping etc. for now (I have stronger opinions on that stuff and no problem on how it’s currently working).

I hope this will spark an interesting debate :-)

Are you talking about the difference between having, say, a single Products section versus having a section for each type of product?

For inspiration, especially regarding to product variations, have a look at this tutorial or even better screencast on how to add a product to a satchmo store.

On a sidenote, you might consider adding fields for each product search attributes that google merchant uses applicable to your product. (available in a feed). That way you are ready to create a DS to create XML to uplaod to google merchant (google base) for better searchresults (productsearch on top of page).

I am considering making some kind of selection field, a simple version of google’s query generator inside my backend

No idea if I can create multiple fields at once btw?….

Are you talking about the difference between having, say, a single Products section versus having a section for each type of product?

Imagine you have apparel you want to sell. This apparel has a title, description, price, various sizes, weight (different weight for each size), and variable number of photos for each piece.

The obvious solution (which is what I currently use) is to have a separate section for each type of apparel (shirts, pants etc.) and then have an additional two sections that define each product size more and photos, that relate to the original main section with select box links.

My current setup includes shirts and accessories. Shirts are set up using the following sections and fields. I feel like “Shirt Sizes” section is unnecessary. While accessories and shirts do not share exactly the same field, I feel like I could combine the two into one section and list the shirts as a separate product for each size (each one does have its own item number).

This is what I currently have (accessories section excluded)

Shirts

• Title
• Description
• Thumbnail
• Price
• Weight

Shirt Sizes

• Shirt (select box link)
• Signed
• Quantity
• Gender
• Item Number

Shirt Images

• Shirt (select box link)
• Title
• Description
• Thumbnail
• Full-size

This is what I think will be better:

Product

• Title
• Description
• Item number
• Price
• Weight
• Color
• Size
• Category
• Demographic (mens,womens,kids etc.)

Product images

• Title
• Description
• Thumbnail
• Full-Size
• Product (select box link)

Inventory

• PayPal ID
• Product (select box link)
• Quantity
• Date
• Status
• Source

One significant improvement I realized was to not include quantities with individual products. Having an inventory section, which interfaces with PayPal IPN, allows me to track inventory without having to delete or reset stuff (the idea occurred to me after using QuickBooks one-day). Add inventory with a positive quantity and record sold (ipn) as negative quantities :-)

Anyways, this is my current thinking. I’d rather keep in symphony because I feel I have greater flexibility. I’m not one to reinvent the wheel, just to reinvent the wheel, but I don’t know of an alternative that would suit my tastes.

I agree, having a generic Products section will save you heaps. Perhaps you’ll want a “Type” or “Category” in there such that you can filter products in the frontend by a specific type.

If you want to add arbitrary fields for specific product types, perhaps you could use the Subsection Manager for name/value pairs.

Great tip about the subsection manager, it will be great to add arbitrary product search attributes.