The decision on how to create your products on your stock tree is important, not only when first using the Connect software but also when deciding how you wish to portray your products on your website.
The decision is limited only to products that have multiple variances i.e. Colours, Sizes and Fabrics amongst others.
Flat structure product;
Flat structure stock tree means that every product and its variance (shown in the Article Description) appear individually on the stock tree.
e.g. Hot Hands is a product that has 3 colour options. This means that Hot Hands will appear three times on the stock tree with a variance of description which specifies Colour (shown below).
- Hot Hands Lavender
- Hot Hands Wild Thing
- Hot Hands Pink
Variance layer product;
Connect has an alternative way to show these products on the stock tree. This enables the stock tree to show only one instance of the product and showing the variance of colour as Options.
e.g. Hot Hands has three colour options of Lavender, Wild Thing and Pink (shown below).
Hot Hands
- Lavender
- Wild Thing
- Pink
Regardless of the way the product is shown on the stock tree each variance maintains its own stock level, product code and barcode.
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Web Brochure
When products are added to the web brochure the impact is on the number of product placements taken on a web page.
- Would you like to see three placements showing essentially the same product but just having a different coloured photograph, or
- Would you rather have only one product placement taken and give the web customer the ability to choose an option of colour when they look at the detail of the product?
This would be more obviously expressed when you have a product that has maybe 10 or more alternative colours or sizes for instance.
Changing a flat structure product to a layered product.
Changing a product from flat to layered has the following implications below.
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PROS
- More ideal look to your web brochure.
- Consolidated view of the stock tree, shorter list of products to view.
- Consistent naming of products.
- Ability to view the quantities of stock at the highest level by variance.
- Ability to change a price, photo etc and cascade the changes through to all options.
- Chance to improve description to aide keywords for search engines.
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CONS
- Time creating a new product with options.
- Transfer of data from one product type to another e.g. Product Code, Photograph, Barcode.
- Transfer of existing stock quantities from one product type to another. This could be particularly time consuming if multiple sites exist.
- Loss of product history (sales and stock movements).
- Delete/Archive of flat structured product.
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