How to create simple or variable products
This video will also show you the basics.
1. Gather the information that you will need
Before we begin, make sure that you have the following information ready.
- The product title (the name of the product preferably no more than 20 characters in length)
- The product description or special features or any other relevant information you want buyers to know before ordering the product
- The product price
- An image for the product
- The product dimensions and weight (if applicable)
There are additional fields that can be populated when creating products but these are the most essential to start with.
2. Create your first product:
- Go to the Products Menu in your Oxxle store
- Your store has been set up with some dummy products and categories to help you see how your store will look. You can delete them at any time.
- Click on "Add New" to create your first product
- Give the product a title/name preferably no longer than 20 characters otherwise the product may display incorrectly when shown in a grid view on your store. You can also do some Search engine planning by naming products in a way that they are easily searchable in Google. For example, if I am looking for a kettle online, I would search for "Russel Hobbs Kettle" or "Cordless Kettle" so it's important that the product names matching those descriptions will appear first in Google. Think about how consumers would search for your particular product and then name appropriately whilst keeping the actual name intact. Stay away from descriptions that are too popular for example "Kettle" as then you might not come up in Google at all. For more SEO tips, read this article
- Next enter your product description. Give as much info as you want to describe the product, its features, benefits, etc. To get an idea of what the description should look like, we recommend finding a similar product on Takealot and then using that as a base to create a beautiful product description that really sells it to the customer.
You will then see that by default your product is going to be a "Simple Product" but if you have Variable products, click on the drop-down and select Variable. An example of a variable product is when you're selling T-shirts with various colours and sizes. Each colour then becomes a different variation and every size becomes a different variation. For more information on creating variable products, please check out this article on setting up a variable product.
If you are selling bookable products, check out this article on adding bookable products. You can also select Virtual or Downloadable Product and if you have Gift Cards enabled, you can select it here as well.
- Next enter the Price. Here you will see the option of Regular or Sales Price. You can enter prices in both but the Sales Price must be less than the Regular Price. This will indicate that the item is on sale. as shown in the example below. If the item is not on sale, simply enter only the Regular Price.
- Next, we recommend giving your product and SKU. The SKU is a Stock Keeping Unit or otherwise in laymen's terms the barcode or identifier of a range of products. It's important that you use SKU's when keeping track of inventory, especially when using product variations as this will help you identify the quantity of stock you have on each item and manage your accounting on items sold and held. If you do not currently have an SKU, you can make one up as you add products for example OXX001, OXX002, etc
-Decide whether you are going to manage stock on this item and how you would like orders to be placed if items are out of stock.
- Enter the shipping information eg weight and dimensions
- Later on, when you have more products you can set the linked products (upsells and cross-sells)
- Select an image for your product. Here you can upload an image directly from your computer.
- Further down you can add more images to form a gallery
- Select a product category or add a new category and publish the product.
Makes sure that your products are displayed correctly. Click on "View Product" or go to your shop page.
Go to next article -Set up your shipping options