Managing Your Product Inventory
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This page describes how to manage your Product Inventory on Diamond Sea.

Overview

Diamond Sea's Product Manager has two basic elements: Categories and Items.

Categories are used to arrange your product offerings into logical groups to help customers quickly find what they are looking for.

Items are the individual products that you have for sale.

Categories can numerous sub-categories, and the sub-categories can contain more sub-categories if desired. For example, If you have a Main Category of Jewelry, you can have subcategory of Rings and Necklaces. You can then have the Rings category containing Engagement Rings, Wedding Bands, etc. An example like the one above could be drawn visually like this:

Jewelry
--- Rings
--------Engagement Rings
--------Wedding Bands
--- Necklaces
--------Diamond Necklaces
--------Gemstone Necklaces

You can create up to 4 levels of sub-categories. While it is possible to break it down beyond that level, it becomes is impractical for users to navigate your site and we do not support it.

Creating Categories

To manage your inventory, log into your account and go to the Manage Product Inventory option.

This will take you to the Inventory Manager page. This is the main page through which you manage your categories and items.

You should create your category layout before you start adding Items to the database. This way you make sure that your site layout will be easily navigated by your customers.

To create a new category, simply click on

About Category 1

Category 1 (Cat1) is the "root" category. This means that it is what all the other product categories are listed under. You can have multiple "root" categories, which allows you to have a "staging area" for you to test things out in before making them "live" in your online store.

On a typical site, the store's root category is called "Home". All categorys that are to be displayed in your store should have "Home" as the value for Category 1.

Most sites also have a "Test" area where you can work on pages that will not appear in your production environment. These areas typically have "Test" or some similar value in the Category 1 field. You can create as many test areas as you like. Just select a value for Category 1 that you want to use to reference the area.

About Category 2

The values that appear in Category 2 (Cat2) are what appear in most stores as the Top-Level categories. For a jewelry site, Category 2 typically contains options such as:

Rings, Earrings, Bracelets, Pendants, Necklaces, Men's Jewelry, Featured Items and Gift Ideas

These are the standard categories used for Jewelry. You are not required to use these, but it will provide some uniformity with other sites which makes it easier and quicker for customers to find what they are looking for. It will also make it a little easier when importing inventory from other suppliers into your account, as the categories will be more likely to line up correctly.

About Categories 3, 4 and 5

These are the sub-categories used to break down the main categories (Cat2) into managable groups to make it easier for customers to quickly find the items that they are looking for. You can make these anything you like, but if you stick to "standard" categories, it will have the same benefits as mentioned above with the Cat2 standards.

Creating a New Category

To create a new category, simply click on the Add a New Category link. You will get a new page where you can enter all the information about the new category.

Category Title is tyipcally one to three words long and is displayed next to the category's image (see below) and is usually right above the Category Description.

Category Description is usually a phrase or sentence providing just a bit more detail than the Category Title.

Category Keywords should be a list of words, separated by spaces, that you want this category to appear with when someone uses the site's search engine with those words.

Category Header HTML is the web page text and/or images that will appear on the top of the listing when a user clicks on the category. After the header will appear any sub-categories and then any Items for that category. After that, the Category Footer HTML will be displayed at the bottom ofthe listing.

CatSKU is where you put the SKU for the items whose graphic you want to use as the picture for this category. You can leave it blank until you have entered your items. You can come back at any time and change it (or any of the settings on this page). You can also use the SKU "Logo" and it will use your company logo that your account was set up with.

Category Active is used to turn categories on and off. This is useful when you are adding items to a new category and don't want it to appear on your site yet. It should contain either a Y or an N.

CategoryID and MemberID are used internally by the database and are displayed for your own reference and are not editable values.

At the bottom of the page is a preview area where you can get a sense of what the Headers and Footers will look like.

Creating a New Item

Creating a new item works like creating a new category, just with more options.

The field names all have explanations next to them which explain how they work.

Below the fields is a list of all categories. To quickly place an item into one or more categories, just check the boxes next to the categories you wish it to appear in.