Diff Between Categories and Products

[sparrowce]

ZenCart 1.3.9 newbie question, I've been searching the forums and have installed ZenCart and the Bookshelf template and have gone through the Administration checklist and modified settings and would like to now expand the categories/products. Can anyone direct me to a 'for dummies' overview of categories and products, as I have not yet found a link that explains what they are and the differences.

Example, we will have many books. Would books be the category or product? I see there is a Product - Music in the catalog, categories/products dropdown, but am very unclear as the difference between new category and new product and how creating one or the other affects the result.

What is the best way to set up books and greeting cards?

Thank you!

[stevesh]

I don't know exactly how you would want to set things up, but a category is a division of certain types of products. In the case of books, it might be Mystery, Science Fiction, Children's, etc. Products within the categories would be the books themselves.

You can have categories in categories (called subcategories in Zencart) to further divide things, but you can't have both products and subcategories in a category.

[sparrowce]

Thank you, I am not sure yet about setup yet but wanted to be sure to have an understanding of what category means and what product means. I think I want to make sure it's set up so I can add different types of books - type 1, type 2, etc., so if I'm understanding your reply, I would create a category for each type of book, the example of children's, etc., then under those categories list the books which would be the products. Thank you very much!

[stevesh]

That's correct. If you wanted to further separate stuff, you could create a category called Young Readers and two subcategories, Childen and Teen, and place the proper products (books) in each. You can copy products to multiple categories, too, if you have books which fall into more than one. I'm doing just that in a site I'm curretly building.

[sparrowce]

Thank you so much for the clarifications, it is very helpful and just what I needed to help me get ahold of understanding and getting started on the right track, thank you again.

[stevesh]

If your products are mostly books, there's another book-related template - http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35389. I haven't used it.

[sparrowce]

Thank you for the link, it looks interesting, though none of the links it contains seem to work right, at least for me. I've added a category and am starting to add products, now, it works nicely and your explanation helps. It looks like I have alot to learn about images, image sizing and how to set the sizes in the template, and how to add paragraph/style to the product description, so I'm going to take one step at a time and get the hang of adding/organizing the categories and products, then will tackle the images and descriptions next step. Thank you very much.