Quick Start: Creating Products
From your admin site go to the Catalog menu and choose Products. Click the Add New Product button in the left column or at the bottom of the product list.
The Product Edit page will now display. A Name and SKU are required to create a product. Enter your product's name and SKU. You'll also want to set a price for your product.
The MSRP price is the manufacturer's suggest price and is optional. If the MSRP price is higher than the Price for your product, the MSRP price will be shown with a strikethrough on the store. This gives the appearance of your product being on sale and may result in more customers adding the product to your cart. The cost field is also option and can be used to generate profitability reports showing how much gross margin you made on the sale of products.
Next use the Browse button in the right column to upload a photo from your computer. As soon as you choose a photo it will be uploaded, resized and your product will be saved.
The rest of the information is optional but here are some of the common fields you'll want to use:
- Description - This is the text description of your product. It is not only important for your customers but also for search engines. The keywords that you use in this description will be index by search engines and may be used to send customers directly to this product page after a search.
- Meta Title, Meta Keywords, Meta Description - All of these fields are used by search engines to help figure out what your product page is about. The meta title appears in at the very top of most web browsers and should contain the most important words. If you leave this blank, BV Commerce will insert the product's name and SKU.
Meta Keywords should be a comma separated list of important words for your product. Plural forms of words are okay for search engines. For example, "widgets,blue,industrial,ABC123" might be a good set of keywords. Some search engines, like Google, may ignore the meta keywords field and instead look to the actual text of the page and the title. It is important that your meta keyword reflect that content of the page otherwise most search engines will ignore them.
Meta Description should be used as a short summary of your main product description. Many search engines will only look at the first few hundred characters of the meta description so try to be brief with the most important words coming first. - Advanced » Allow Reviews - Under the advanced section, the Allow Reviews checkbox lets customers submit reviews for your products. By default reviews are moderated so you have the chance to approve or edit reviews before they appear on your store. Reviews are an excellent way to add more unique content to your store. Search engines love unique content and reviews are a great way to get more visibility in search engines.