Using Product Option Groups

Let’s say you want to sell an item that comes with different options on your web site. This is where product option groups come in. With an option group, you can display a drop-down menu for your customers to choose from when purchasing an item from you, instead of having to list each item separately on your site. So if you are selling a T-Shirt that comes in 5 different sizes and 4 colors, you can create two groups, one called “Size” and one called “Color”, and load those groups with the actual options, like “Large” or “Pink”. Additionally if you are using our advanced inventory management features, these options can tie into actual inventory model numbers, so different options deplete different inventory items based upon which item is chosen. Let’s go ahead and create an option group now:

1. If you are using our retail webPOS product, click “Managers Menu” in the upper right corner of your screen. If you are using our eCommerce product, this step is not necessary.
2. Click “Edit Product Option Groups” under the “Web Site Functions” menu.
3. If this is the first product option group you are creating, you will see a message telling you that there are no product option group currently in the database. Click the link that says “add a product option group”.

You are now at the product option group screen. There are several fields on this form that we’ll go over now:

• Name – This field is required, this is the name of your option group. If you are creating an option group for colors of tennis rackets, for instance, you might want to type “Tennis Racket Colors” in this field. Each of your product option groups must have a unique name.
• Description – This is an optional field, and if filled in this is the name of the group that will be shown to your customer when browsing your site. If this is not filled in the system will show your customer whatever you have typed in the “Name” field. In the example of our tennis rackets, the customer doesn’t need to see the entire name we gave this field, so we would simply type “Color” into this field.
• Inactive – If you check this box the option group is made inactive and will no longer show on your products.

We will start out by creating a sample option group for our T-Shirt. The first step is to create the group itself, and then we will add the actual options to it:

1. Click inside the “Name” field and type “TShirt Size”.
2. Click inside the “Description” field and type “Size”.
3. Click the “Save Changes” button in the lower left corner of the form.

Make sure you see “New Option Group Added” at the top of your screen. Now that our group has been created, we can put individual options into it. In the case of our T-shirts, we’ll imagine they come in sizes “Small”, “Medium”, and “Large”. In the section of the form below “Option group items”, you’ll see a series of fields. Let’s take a look at these:

• Option Description – This field is required, and is the name of the option as it will be displayed to your customer on your web site.
• Price – If this option changes the price of your item, you can input the price difference into this field and it will be added to the price of the item when your customer adds it to their shopping cart.
• Default – If this box is checked this option will be pre-selected for your customer. This is useful if the item has a commonly selected option, checking this will pre-select this option for your customer.
• Inactive – If this box is checked, it will remove this option from the group.
• Inventory model number – If you are using the inventory system, this field will let you associate this option with an actual inventory model number so the system will deplete the proper item out of your inventory. If you are using this option to deplete your inventory, you can only use one product option group per item, otherwise the inventory will not be properly depleted. Also, you MUST make sure that you put in a valid Model Number into this box, or the system will not know which item to deplete out of your inventory.

Let’s go ahead and put the actual options into our group:

1. Click inside the “Option Description” field and type “Small”.
2. Click “Save Changes” at the lower left of the form.

Make sure you see “Option Group Saved” at the top of your screen. You’ll notice now that we’ve added our first option to the group, you have another blank line under the small option we just added for additional options. We’re also going to assume that the medium size is our most popular option, so we’ll pre-select that for our customers, and that the large size adds $2.00 to the price of our product. Note that when we insert the price of the option, we’re only going to tell the system what the price difference is, not the entire price of the item:

1. Click inside the second “Option Description” field, and type “Medium”.
2. Click the second checkbox underneath “Default”.
3. Click the “Save Changes” button at the lower left corner of the form.

Make sure your screen again displays “Option Group Saved” at the top of your screen. We’ll now add our final option:

1. Click inside the third “Option Description” field, and type “Large”.
2. Click inside the third “Price” field and type “2.00”.
3. Click the “Save Changes” button at the lower left corner of the form.

Once more, make sure your screen displays “Option Group Saved” near the top of your screen. Now that we’ve created our option group and added the individual options to it, we need to associate it with the product or products that we want to show the options.

1. If you are using our retail webPOS product, click “Managers Menu” in the upper right corner of your screen. If you are using our eCommerce product, click “Main Menu” in the upper right corner of your screen.
2. Click on the “Product Search” link under the section “Inventory Management”.
3. Use the Product Search to find a product you’ve previously posted onto your web site.
4. Once you have selected your product, click the “View/change web details” link in the lower right corner of the form.

On the web details screen, near the bottom, you’ll see 5 drop down menus under the heading “Product Option Groups”. This is where you can assign which group or groups you want to have displayed to your customers. Let’s go ahead and assign the product option group we just created to this item.

1. Click the first drop down box under the “Product Option Groups” heading near the bottom of the form.
2. Select the product option group we just added, “TShirt Size”.
3. Click the “Save Web Details” button at the bottom of this form.

That’s it! You can now take a look on your web site at the product you just added, and you’ll see now just about the “Add To Cart” button that your customers will now have a drop down menu with the 3 choices we added into that group. When the order comes in on the backend, the system will display which of the choices the customer selected, so you’ll be able to fulfill the proper product.

As always, if there is anything we can assist you with, don’t hesitate to contact us.