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Dec 31, 2019How To: Change Order Status
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Dec 29, 2019Intoduction to Seller Admin Panel
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Dec 29, 2019How to Add and Edit Products
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Dec 29, 2019How To Define Wholesale Prices for the Product
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Dec 28, 2019Blog
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Dec 24, 2019Tips on How to Showcase Products Right on Your Store
Intoduction to Seller Admin Panel
Introduction to the Administration Panel
The Administration Panel (or the admin panel for short) is the primary tool for you to work with your online store. Here you can manage products and orders, offer discounts, interact with your customers, change the look of your store and do much more.
The admin panel is responsive: it adapts to the screen size of the device you view it from. That way, you can manage your store from mobile devices.
Connect to Your Admin Panel
To find the admin panel, open your online store and scrol to the bottom of the page and select Sellers' Zone > Login as Seller
Enter the the email you used in registering and your password then click the Sign in button.
The Dashboard
The first thing you’ll notice is the Dashboard, where you can check sales statistics, view recent orders and product changes. The Dashboard also provides information from the database, such as the number of active products and registered customers.
- Total number of orders, sales and taxes sums in your store.
- Monthly statistics of your store in the form of a diagram.
- Brief statistics of the store: the number of products, customers, pages, etc. Click on the number of items to go to the page with the detailed list of these items.
- Recent orders made in your store. Switch between the tabs to see orders with particular statuses.
- The number of orders with the particular status and total income received by the orders of this type.
- Brief variant of information, represented in the Administration → Logs section. Click the Show all link to view the full log.
You can also choose the period of time, for which the information on the dashboard is displayed. Click on the period in the right upper corner of the page and choose the required period of time from the drop-down menu. Optionally, click Custom Range to define your own period and press Apply.
The Top Bar Let’s take a look at the top bar:
- Administration—make backups of your store, import and export data, edit your stores, shipping methods and currencies
- Design—edit your store’s menus, change the look of your store and the structure of certain types of pages.
Store Operations
The panel below the top bar serves to manage the operations of your store:
- The home icon takes you to the Dashboard
- Orders—view sales reports and manage your orders and shipments
- Products—edit products and their categories, features, filters, and options
- Customers—manage the store’s administrators and registered customers, as user groups with different privileges and chat with your store customers.
- Website—create and publish pages, polls, forms and links, as well as to manage the SEO aspects of your store.
- Vendors—add and edit your business information, contact, description, logo, terms and condition, change your plan and also see your transaction details.
How to Add and Edit Products
How to Add and Edit Products
You can add and edit products using different methods.
Adding One Product
- Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store, then click the + button in the upper right part of the page.
- The product creation page will open. Configure the required properties of the product. You’ll be able to edit the product properties later at any time.
Some properties don’t appear during product creation and are available only when you edit a product.
- Click the Create button.
Adding Multiple Products
- Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.
- Click the gear button in the upper right part of the page and choose Bulk product addition.
- Add products and fill in the empty fields.
- Click Create.
Cloning a Product
If you plan to have several products with identical properties, you don’t need to create each of them manually. Instead of specifying the product properties each time that you add a new product, you can:
- Set up one sample product with the common properties.
- Clone the sample product.
- Change the names and individual properties of the clone products.
On the List of Products
- Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.
- Select the the products that you’d like to clone by clicking on them.
- Choose Clone selected in the Actions menu.
- Clone products will be created with Disabled status.
- Edit the clone products and enable them by changing their statuses to Active.
Editing Multiple Products at Once
You can edit the properties of a group of products.
- Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.
- Select the the products that you’d like to edit by clicking on them.
- Click Edit selected above the list of products.
- A pop-up window will open. Tick the checkboxes of the product properties you’d like to edit, then click Modify selected.
Avoid choosing too many properties at once, or else it will be inconvenient to edit them all.
- The selected products and their properties will appear on one page. Edit them, then click the Save button in the top right corner.
Use Apply values to all the selected products in the upper left part of the page to update the value of the property for all the selected products at once.
Updating Prices and Stock for All Products
CS-Cart has a special page where you can update some properties all products at once. For example, you can increase the prices of all products by 10%, or increase the list price to display discount labels on all products.
To update all products:
- In the administration panel, go to Products → Products.
- Click the gear button in the upper right part of the page and choose Global update.
- A new page will open. There you can update the following product properties:
- Price
- List price
- In stock (the number of products in stock)
- Price in points
- Once you’ve chosen how to update product properties, click Apply.
Importing Products
You can import (upload) products from a CSV file. CSV is a popular spreadsheet format. A line in a CSV file is one line of the table.
CSV files can be edited in spreadsheet editors such as LibreOffice Calc, OpenOffice Calc, Microsoft Excel. We recommend using LibreOffice (a free office suite) to edit CSV files.
To demonstrate the full process, let’s export one of the products to a CSV file first.
- Go to Products → Products in the administration panel of your store.
- Select the products you’d like to export by clicking on them.
- Choose Export selected in the Actions menu above the product list.
- The Export data page will open. There you will be able to chose the exported fields and change export properties. Each exported field is an equivalent of a product property. We recommend that you leave everything as is for the first time. After everything is set up, click Export.
- Open the exported file in the spreadsheet editor. The default delimiter for CSV is semicolon.
- Each column of the table contains the specific type of the product data.The product is identified by the Product code; it means that:
- All products must have unique product codes.
- If a product code already exists in a database, the product with this code will be updated or replaced.
- If the product doesn’t exist in a database, a new product will be created.
- Product code
- Language
- Store—the storefront to which the product belongs.
- Product name—the name of the product
- Category—the category to which the product belongs
If a category doesn’t exist in the database, it will be created. Use category delimiters to create a tree-like category structure and add a product to a specific subcategory.
- Use the sample product as an example and add new products to the table. Each line is a new product.
- Save the file in the CSV format, and you’ll be able to import it.
How To Define Wholesale Prices for the Product
How To: Define Wholesale Prices for the Product
To define the wholesale prices for the product:
- In the Administration panel, go to Products → Products.
- Click on the name of the necessary product to open the Editing product page.
- Open the Quantity discounts tab.
- In the Quantity input field, specify the minimum number of items which must be added to cart for the wholesale price to apply. In the Value input field, enter a fixed wholesale price of one item, or the discount rate in percent.In the User group select box, you can select a user group whose members will be able to purchase the product at the wholesale price after they have logged in.
- To add more than one price, click on the + icon and specify a new amount of products and a wholesale price.
- Click the Save button to apply the changes.
The section with wholesale prices will be displayed for a customer on the storefront similar to the screenshot below:
Tips on How to Showcase Products Right on Your Store
Hello!
Adam is a business owner. He sells fedoras in his small shop in the city center. To make shopping easier and to drive more customers, Adam opens an online store, as well. Soon, though, he encounters a problem: his brick-and-mortar store is selling well but his online store isn’t bringing in new customers or income.
Adam’s actually got a fairly simple problem: he hasn’t presented his fedoras well! He quickly took product photos on his smartphone and copied poor descriptions from the manufacturer website. To drive more visitors to the online store and convert them into paying customers, Adam has to put effort into presenting his products in the right way.
While in brick-and-mortar stores people can see the actual products with their eyes and hold them with their hands, in online stores they see products as images. And, of course, in brick-and-mortar stores people can talk to the seller and find out about the features and benefits of the product—in online stores, they have to trust product descriptions.
In this post we’re going to talk about two key things you be doing when showcasing your products in your online storefront: product images and product descriptions.
1. Make Your Products Look Cool in the Images
In brick-and-mortar stores, customers can hold and try products before buying. When customers can see a product in real life and hold it in their hands, it weighs the scales in the seller’s favor.
In online stores, people obviously cannot try your products in the same way—which is why you need to take your online shoppers as close as possible to that feeling of seeing and holding your product, just like in a physical store. Professional product photos taken from different angles will help you.
The easiest way to get professional photos is to hire a pro photographer with a studio. Hiring a photographer may be expensive but you get results in the fastest and the easiest way. However, if you’ve got budgetary considerations, then it’s still possible to take cool product photos yourself.
Just be sure to remember three things: 1) use a neutral color background, 2) place the product on a stand, and 3) make sure the product is well-lit and doesn’t drop weird shadows. You don’t need tons of expensive equipment to take nice product photos but you need a few accessories:
- A DSLR or mirrorless camera or smartphone with a good camera (iPhone 5S and newer will do)
- An appropriate colored background (choose between white, grey, and black)
- A tripod for your camera or smartphone to keep it steady
- A light source (soft light from a window on a cloudy day is perfect). You can also build a light box yourself.
- A reflector to reflect soft light from the main light source
- An image editor like Photoshop to edit photos: crop, brighten, or lighten. It’s free and is more than enough for basic photo editing.
Look at these well-lit, detailed photos. Don’t they make your mouth water already? :-)
2. Compose Product Descriptions that Sell, not just Describe
Having attractive product photos is only half the battle. Product descriptions are important, as well: from a description a customer understands whether the product can solve his problem or not. That’s why product descriptions should not simply describe, they have to tell a customer what his or her problem the product can solve and how. For example, a laptop lets a customer work anywhere, not only at home or in the office; a fedora can become a finishing touch for a retro party costume.
Although any product solves some problem, different products need different approaches in writing descriptions. Here are eight guidelines on how to compose good product descriptions that sell:
- Show the product benefits the way that the customer understands them. Describe product advantages clearly without excessive words and technical terms. For example, don’t write that this electric guitar has a single coil pickup and a humbucker at the bridge position. Talk instead about what a customer gets from those: “This electric guitar suits melodic solos and bone-rattling riffs”. That’s all a customer needs to know.
- Don’t speak to the customer with fake phrases and silly bunkum. These days, everybody is immune to such statements as “This smartphone is developed by leading professionals and uses the latest innovative technologies”. There’s no point in saying things like this, because you can’t prove anything with facts. People don’t believe your words, no matter how beautiful, unless you prove them with facts.
- Personalize product descriptions. First, decide who your ideal customer is. Then address your ideal customer directly as if he’s standing in front of you. Use the words and the kind of speech your ideal customer uses. Talk to your customer.
- Use words that call for pleasant feelings. Words such as “crispy”, “creamy”, and “smooth” nudge a customer closer to the purchase, because he wants to experience those feelings. Be careful not to overuse these kind of words.
- Entertain the customer with a short story. Tell the customer a catching story about your product. A paragraph is enough to relax the customer and keep him on the product page longer.
- Make the customer’s imagination work for you. When reading a product description, the customer should feel that he already owns the product. Tell the customer what will happen and how his life will change when he gets the product. Sell a dream.
- Show the customer that the product is much in-demand. People prefer popular products. Before buying, customers usually read reviews and look for testimonials from real people. Add a testimonial of a satisfied customer to the product description, plus attach a photo of that customer. You can also write that the product is this month’s bestseller.
- Think through the structure of a description. Writing a long description in plain text is a bad idea. There’s a better chance that a customer reads the whole description if you keep it short, well-structured, and well-formatted. Divide the text into paragraphs, add headers, choose a bigger font size, and format everything. Kind of like how we’ve done here, for example.
Check out this coffee description: it’s short and well-structured, activates the customer’s imagination, and entertains with a short story:
Hope our advice will come in handy and you’ll be able to drive more customers thanks to cool product images and great product descriptions!
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