Catalog Overview

Products are the basis of an online store, and product management is an essential part of your store management strategy. Product information helps customers decide whether they want to purchase an item or not. So make sure to have quality product content in the store because it builds your customers' confidence that they are getting what they need and expect.

Some essential components of product management are:

• Adding products.
• Adding Manufacturers/brands.
• Setting up Categories to make navigation easy.
• Adding good product descriptions and appealing pictures.
• List all possible product variants.
• Defining product tags to make product search quick and effective.

A catalog on the example of Concerto Commerce's demo store

Let's look at the catalog components from the front end/public store view of a website. We will use our demo store in the following examples based on the "Venture Theme." To see the most popular themes and the full demo store, visit the demo site (insert demo site URL).

Categories

• When adding categories to your store, ensure they clearly describe the products (or subcategories) they contain. As in the following example, the Boards category only contains boards:  

Create categories using the Add new button on the Catalog → Categories page.

• Use subcategories when you need to divide a general category into specific ones. It makes the search process easier for your customers. As in the example below, the Lighting category contains the Switch & Wiring, Interior Lighting, and Exterior Lighting subcategories: 

Add the Parent category on the category edit page into a subcategory.

• Add the most popular categories to the top menu, visible on each page, to attract more customers: 

Use the Include in top menu checkbox on the category edit page to do this.

• Add the most interesting categories to the home page. These categories will be first what a customer sees when visiting your store:  

To do this, use the Show on home page checkbox on the category edit page.

• Allow your customers to search in categories using filters:  

The filter functionality uses specification Attributes.

• Allow your customers to sort products and change the display mode:  

For more information about sorting, visit catalog settings under the "configuration" section. Use the Allow customers to select page size and Page size options fields from the category edit page to set up the display mode.