Highlighting Products With "Classes"

G'day,

My online store could benefit from a better way to highlight types of items. If you like, think of it as a more granular form of Featured Products.

I think it would help to generate sales if people could more easily identify certain "classes" of items. For example, if there was a way to setup "classes" of items like "Ladies Choice", "For Kids", "Best Buy", "Managers Choice", "Best Seller", "We Recommend" etc.

Each class could have an icon/logo (maybe a small and large version) and/or text associated with it. Then have a way to assign products to these "classes".

When browsing the products or categories, shoppers would be easily shown the classes matching the product. Plus people would be able to browse a class.

Is there already a mod to do something like this? If not, is there someone who could help me to create it?

Cheers, Lloyd Borrett.

Quick workaround for these types of vertical selections is to use the manufacturers function (if you're not already)

So I use this here http://prominentpets.com/

Standard categories on the left and vertical options like "Dog Groomer Gear" on the right which contains grooming gear from any category.

~Melanie

mprough:

Quick workaround for these types of vertical selections is to use the manufacturers function (if you're not already)~Melanie

An excellent suggestion Melane. Unfortunately, I'm already using manufacturers, so that won't work for me.

And yes, something like the manufacturers function with some minor display options is the functionality I'd like to have. But the big difference is that I want a product to be able to be listed in multiple "classes".

Cheers, Lloyd Borrett.

You can create additional categories and "link" your products to multiple categories.

Kim:

You can create additional categories and "link" your products to multiple categories.

Yes Kim, and I already use that feature extensively.

But that doesn't let me do what I want to do. First, it complicates the categories menus. Plus using categories for two different purposes is likely to confuse shoppers.

But most importantly, when people browse through the products listed in the proper categories, or when they look at a specific item, I want them to see the small or large logo/icon associated with the "classes" the product also belongs to.

That's the prime requirement for what I want to do.

Being able to list products by "classes" is a secondary requirement.

Think of it as being like when you browse through a print catalogue. Often the catalogue will have different icons to visually highlight products with things like "Best Buy", "Best Seller", Manager's Choice", "Star Buy", "We Recommend", "Exclusive to Us", "Ladies Choice" and "Brand New". Indeed, these examples were taken from a single, visually appealing and effective print catalogue I had to hand. And individual products could have more than one of those "classes" assigned to them.

Of course, I could also create icons for those "classes" and hard code the images into the product descriptions of appropriate products. But that's not the elegant, easy to manage and effective solution I'm looking for.

Cheers, Lloyd Borrett.

You could possibly adapt the Music Product type "Genres" to do what you want. It will take some custom coding though.

Kim:

You could possibly adapt the Music Product type "Genres" to do what you want. It will take some custom coding though.

Thanks for the suggestion Kim.

I've never looked at the music "genres". That could possibly be a way forward.

Cheers, Lloyd Borrett.