In Cloud Commerce Pro we introduced an alternative product view. Normally all products are accessed by going through the products menu and selecting the appropriate range and then variation. In the new Product Manager you are able to search for individual SKU’s and access them directly.

You can also apply many filters to find the exact set of products you are looking for. Detailed filter searching is available through this view, for example, if you wish to find all the products with the colour red you could do this easily. You can then apply updates to the products in view.

In the future we will be adding many more actions to the Product Manager view to enable faster product updates.

You can currently update stock, prices, view which channels your products are listed on, edit product details, set pseudo-stock and many other actions.

To access the product manager screen, click the product manager button.

Initially, product manager will load all your products and show a small subset. You can then begin to apply various filters as required.

The initial view is called inventory view and this shows your products and how many sales channels they are actually listed on at that time.

In the first filter your find a list of all your sales channels.

You can also filter by channel type, this will give you all products within a given channel type. For example, to see all your Amazon products, just use the Amazon type.

You can also filter by typing an individual product SKU or all or part of a product name. Product manager will return one or more products that match your search.

Please note, you can search for more than one product by typing more than one SKU or product name and separating them by a semi-colon.

You can also search by your master category which is set in the product options screen. Whichever product option you set to be your master option will be available to filter by in this category field.

At any time you can refresh the view by clicking the refresh icon.

You can also filter by all other product options and once you select an option type you can then choose the option value drop-down to choose the option you wish to filter on.

For example, if you select the option colour, you will then be able to filter on all colours used in any of your products. So, for example, you could choose to only show products that are red.

You can also filter by whether the product is listed on the channel, unlisted or if the product has been archived away.

Listed products are denoted by a green tick in the right-hand column and unlisted by a red cross.

To switch drag and drop modes click on the icon that looks like a small target.

You can choose from three different drag and drop modes.

Clone products allows you to merge two products together, making the dragged one a clone of the one you drop onto. When sales arrive for either of those products they will be deducted from the inventory of the first product, called the master. This mode is useful if you have imported two (or more) products from your sales channel that are actually the same product. They may be listed with different SKU’s on for example, Amazon, but when you want to ship the product, it is the same product from your warehouse.

Combine products allows you to merge two products across two different sales channels together to make one product. When you drag one onto the other, the second product is removed from the system and all records for orders etc are merged with the first one. This is useful when you have imported the same product from more than one channel accidentally. Ordinarily you should always every only create one inventory item for a product and all or products on other channels should be mapped to the inventory item. If you accidentally import the same product twice this option can be used to merge them together leaving you with just one inventory record for the same item.

Move products is a mode that allows you to move products in the inventory from one range to another. For example, if you had two ranges of products and one range had small, medium and large and the other range had extra large in it by accident, then you could merge these two together using the move products function.

For each of these modes, simply select the mode and then locate the two products and drag them together. Make sure you drag the secondary product on to the one that you wish to become the master. You will be shown a dialogue box to confirm your actions.

Remember you can locate two different SKUs to merge together by simply typing both SKUs separated by a semi colon.

You can filter on a range of products entering a start and end price to find products only priced within that range.

By default, product manager shows each type of product, but you may, for example, only wish to see your multi-listings. To achieve this switch off the other three product types.

You can also choose how many products to show per page and with a view type option, you can choose whether to display your products in a flat or nested mode.

Flat mode shows all products at the same level irrespective of whether they are clones.

Nested mode shows all clones indented next to their parent product.

When you are in inventory view, the actions menu to the right of the product will only show the option “edit product”. Click this will take you to the standard product editor menu.

Once in the standard product edit menu, you can change various details on your product as if you are using the standard products screen.

The product editor window opens in a separate window so if you wish to return to product manager you can simply close the window. Pressing back will take you to the product range in the normal product editor, not back to the Product Manager.

Click on the channel count to display a full list of all channels that this product is eligible for.

The count is the number of channels it is currently listed on.

Once you have clicked the channel number, Product Manager will display the product from your inventory and each of your channels and whether it is listed on each of these channels based on a green tick (Listed) or red cross (Not Listed).

You can edit the Price, Stock Levels and Pseudo Stock levels by clicking the small pen icon, which will switch Product Manager into bulk edit mode.

Once you have clicked the pen icon the columns change to display edit boxes for Price, Real Stock levels, Pseudo Stock levels and Pseudo Stock mode.

Remember if you change stock levels here they will be updated in your inventory and audit trails and reflected to all the channels.

If you enable Pseudo Stock mode, this will override the real stock levels but only for that channel and other linked channels (in the case of Amazon Europe).

To close edit mode click the circular arrow.

You can view the weights and sizes attributed to an item by rolling over the three dots at the end of the product name field. If you wish to edit these weights and sizes, please click the edit product menu in the listing status column.

When Product Manager is in Sales Channel mode you have extra options other than Edit Product. In addition you have two further options, Edit Listing and Sync Listing.

Edit Listing: Click this link to edit the sales channel data for this product. For example if you click the Amazon edit listing option it will take you to a screen and enable you to edit details about that listing on Amazon.

Sync Listing: This forces a synchronisation between your inventory and the sales channel data. The use of this option is not usually necessary unless advised by your product manager or if you feel the data is out of sync.