Zen Cart Products

Categories and Products

Zen Cart is quite flexible in how it allows you to set up your catalog. I'll describe a fairly simple catalog with categories, sub-categories, products and product attributes. Zen does restrict intermixing of categories and products. You may have subcategories as deep as you'd like, but once you define products within a subcategory you may not add a subcategory.

Each category will be associated with a product type. There are 5 product types defined by Zen Cart, Product General, Product Music, Document General, Document Product, and Product Free Shipping. By default a category will be restricted to "Product General".

The product type determines many aspects of how your catalog entries appear. To change things like whether you show weight of a product, how many are in stock, when an item was added to the catalog, etc, edit the product type. From the admin panel, choose Catalog --> Product Types.

Example

 Store name: Pico-pet Ceramics and Metalwork
    Ceramics
       Mugs
         Day of the Dead Cup
         Black Cat Cup
       Plates
         Day of the Dead Plate
         Black Cat Plate
       Bowls
         Day of the Dead Soup Bowl
         Day of the Dead Cereal Bowl
         Black Cat Soup Bowl
         Black Cat Cereal Bowl
    Metalwork
       Candlesticks
         Interwined Dragon Candlesticks, pair
         Silver Spiral Candlesticks, pair
       Silverware
         DD Spoons
         DD Forks
         DD Knives

My categories are Ceramics, and Metalwork. To define these start in the admin panel, and select Catalog --> Categories and Products. You'll find a number of products pre-installed as examples. You can delete these or disable them as you choose. To delete press the red button with an X on the line for the item. To disable press the green status button. This takes you to an update page where you can select enabled or disabled.

To add a category, press the "New Category" button near the bottom of the page. Note: if you have a particular order that you want your categories to appear in be sure to set the Sort Order at the bottom of the page, otherwise they will sort into alphabetical order.

To define a sub-category, select the category you want it to be a part of and click. This will bring you to a new page showing only subcategories of the category you've selected. Defining a subcategory is done just like a category definition.

To add products, select the category or subcategory that the product will belong to, and click. You can now define products within this category/subcategory.

Product Attributes

Products often have characteristics that a customer would like to specify, such as size, color, length, or pattern. You can associate these with products through Zen Cart's product attributes features, including providing sample pictures, and/or changing the price based on an attribute's selection.

Product attributes may be applied to many different products, so they are created independent of the products. To create new attributes and apply them to products you'll be using the Option Name Manager to create product attribute names, like size, or pattern, the Option Value Manger to associate choices within an Option Name, like gold, blue, gray, or black, and finally you'll use the Attribute Controller to associate possible options to a product. This will be done by adding option name, option value pairs to a product. This allows you to have several similar products that have different option values.

For example, the Dead of the Dead mugs may have available colors of black and red, whereas the Black Cat mug only comes in black.

To create a new attribute go to your admin panel and and select Catalog --> Option Name Manger.

To create new values for this option select Catalog --> Option Value Manager. You'll probably find this pane less confusing if you select "Display Global Options OFF" for now.

Once these have been added, you can associate them with products by selecting Catalog --> Attribute Controller.