eStore – Best Practices For Store Organization?

[mwsmedia]

This is a theory / practice question more than a technical one. Hopefully I can draw from the collective experience of the community for some ideas.

I’ll be selling products that could potentially have a number of different paths to purchase and different “editions.” For example:

A Novel might have:

— a paperback edition sold and shipped from my site

— a paperback autographed edition sold and shipped from my site

— a downloadable e-book edition sold and linked from my site

— a Kindle edition sold through an external (affiliate) link

— a Nook edition sold through an external (affiliate) link

— a paperback edition sold through an external (affiliate) link (Amazon, B&N, etc.)

I want the user to be able to see products by title, of course, but also to, for example, see every product with downloadable version sold through my site. Does that make sense?

I’m not sure how to organize my product categories for the best user clarity — does it make the most sense to categorize by product type (tangible local, tangible external, downloadable local, downloadable external, and so on) or some other way..?

Any and all ideas are welcome. I may be overthinking it… help!

Best,

Matthew Wayne Selznick

[wzp]

Imitate the master (Amazon), and create a single product page for the title; with variations the different versions forking off from there.

For the versions whose sales will be processed through your site, use variations. For versions whose sales will be processed through other sites, use the appropriate external affiliate links for those versions.

Keep in mind that when using variations, you can have a maximum of 3 physical and one digital variation per product. To have more than these, you will have to “get creative.”

[admin]

Create lots of categories. For example: paperback, paperback autographed, downloadable, Kindle edition etc. Apply categories to your products as you see fit (each product should belong to one or multiple categories). You can also create multiple eStore products for some of your products that require different variations.

Now, create a bunch of different landing pages to show the products from various categories on that landing page. There are number of eStore shortcodes that will come in handy for this.

You can also use the following eStore extension on one of your landing pages to allow your customers to browse your products and buy it:

http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/ecommerce/wp-estore-browse-products-by-category-addon-2056

Keep things simple at first and over time you can add complexity to it.

[mwsmedia]

WZP — I’m looking closely at digital / physical variations, but the limit of four variations per product is a killer. Wonder why that arbitrary limitation?

Admin — I was hoping to avoid creating a bunch of different products for the same item… especially since, in the case of books, each “product” will have essentially the same image representing it. I guess I can make “PAPERBACK” / “AUTOGRAPHED” / “EPUB” etc ribbons on each distinct graphic… thinking out loud.

Different products might be my only choice, with variations in use on some.

Well, it still beats MarketPress from MPMUDev!

Thanks for the input, gang. I have a clearer head about this now.

[jeremyers1]

mwsmedia,

Did you ever figure out the best way to proceed on this? I have the same problem I am trying to wrap my head around.

My difficulty is that I want to charge shipping for the paperback and hardback editions of the books, but no shipping for the digital editions.

[admin]

Are you thinking of using the shipping option of the eStore plugin or you planning to use PayPal profile based shipping?

How many books do you have?

[Author]

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