Assigning Products & Items

When customers select a product or service to customize…

• … what selections will be available for them to choose from?
• … which categories of items will be required, and which will not?
• … which items will be exclusive (choose one or the other) and which will not (choose any of the following)?
• … which selections will be available in more than 1 unit, if any?
• … how will the price change as different selections are picked?
• … should there be any “default” selections?
• … should you provide customers with instructions on what to select?

ProductCart Build To Order has tools that allow you to flexibly answer all of those questions. You will choose which Standard Products and BTO-Only Items to show on configuration pages in your storefront when you assign products and items to a BTO product.

In the Control Panel, the store administrator allocates existing Standard Products and BTO Only Items to a BTO Product so that customers will be able to view them and select them when they configure and purchase the BTO Product.

For customers to be able to customize and order a BTO product (or save an estimate), two elements have to be in place:

1. The BTO Product itself, which you can think of an empty basket that will include what the customer will add to it.
2. Several selectable items that the customer will choose from, which are assigned to the BTO product.

Since we have already covered how to add a new BTO Product to the store catalog, let's now focus on how to assign other products and items to it.

To get started, select Locate a BTO Product from the BTO menu. Find the BTO Product that you wish to work with, and click on Configure. Again, this assumes that you have added at least one BTO Product to the store catalog. If not, stop here and add it now, and then click on Configure this BTO product or service on the confirmation page.

Because you have not yet specified which options make up this configurable product or service, you will receive the message “This product/service has not yet been configured”. Click on the Start Configuration link to start adding items to this Build To Order product or service.

A great time-saver is the ability to copy the product configuration from an existing BTO Product. This allows you to quickly create similar BTO Products. If you opt to use this feature, you will be able to select any BTO Product that has already been configured and copy its entire product configuration. You can then edit it as you wish.

Now start the configuration. The first step to configuring a BTO Product is to select a category of items that you would like to add to the configuration page. You will then be able to select one or more items within the category. All the items selected within the category will become available options that the customer will be able to choose from on the BTO product configuration page.

You can add unlimited categories to a product configuration, and you can have an unlimited number of selectable items within a category.

Even after you have added a category to the product configuration, you will be able to edit your selection by adding new items, removing items from the category, or removing the entire category from the product configuration.

The steps are:

1. Pick a product category
   Remember that you can take advantage of Hidden Categories
2. Select the items that apply
   Select the check box to the left of the item(s) that you would like to make available as a configurable option for your Build To Order Product. Note that only eligible products within the selected category will be shown. For example, BTO Products cannot be assigned to another BTO Product as a selectable option, and therefore are not shown. Products are shown in alphabetical order, sorted by name. This sorting method is used to assign a default order to the selectable options within the product configuration: i.e. by default all products are ordered by name. As mentioned below, you will able to manually edit the sorting criteria when fine-turning the product configuration.
3. Enter their prices
   You have two options: you can use the regular prices (retail and wholesale) for the selected products or enter new ones.

Once you have chosen all of the items that are going to be available to your customers as options when configuring this BTO Product, click on Submit.

You can always come back to this window at any time to add more products from the same category. Of course, you can also remove items that you had previously selected.

All of the products and items that you have selected will appear to your customers when they choose to configure this BTO Product. How will they be displayed? How can you control the user experience?

• The overall page display settings (e.g. whether options should be shown using drop-down menus vs. radio buttons) are defined using the Build To Order Settings page.
• The many category-specific settings are described under Configuration Options.