hannahv Posted October 31, 2005 Posted October 31, 2005 I'm having a bit of trouble sorting out the logical structure for my products, my original thought process for my store started out along the lines of 'let's choose a category structure'... but everyone I asked said they'd want to browse a different way... great! The store deals with a range of handmade & exclusive products, eg cards, gifts & home items. The manufacturer is 80% my company, though I also have a couple of affiliates who will be selling through my site too (I have a big barn that will shortly be home to my studios and also to a few other artisans). Some of the products are aimed at particular occasions (especially the cards: think new baby, wedding, birthdays, etc), there are certainly a number of main product types (needlework kits, candles, jewellery, and the aforementioned cards as an example), there will be a number of different 'styles' (e.g. funky, traditional, classic, contemporary, etc), things will be made out of specific materials (silver, slate, paper, fabric, wood) and I'd also like to make suggestions (helpful ones!) for people who are a bit stuck for ideas when looking for a gift (items that would suit babies, younger/older children, men, women, couples, etc). So you can see, there may be lots of different ways a customer might want to navigate through the product catalogue (sorry, I'm a Brit ;) ) In real life (though hopefully not for long) I specialise in formulating metadata structures to allow large companies to identify & retrieve unstructured data - ie, knowledge & records management stuff, and it has dawned on me that selling stuff is no different to trying to find that elusive report that you know is out there somewhere. What I do at work is add a set of metadata fields (let's call them extra product fields) tailored to the company, and use the search engine to construct each 'folder' listing on the fly, apparently dropping an item into as many different 'folders' as required, though only virtually. Having done some preliminary investigations (& not found anything out there that does it already), I have figured out that I can use the EZ extra product fields (or similar) to add the extra data to the product, and construct a search query made up from the table queries coupled with the session info (once I've looked for it, this is still me musing about possibilities), and I can probably hard code that into the Category info box relatively easily. I need to sleep on this a little, as I haven't yet got my head around how I would offer my customers the next level down and so on (maybe something like the extended Categories contribution), not the sql side so much as literally how best to make that appear on screen, but I wanted to see if anybody had any thoughts about the idea before I ran too far ahead & fell over in a big heap.... Of course, the ideal way would be to get each new field added to automatically form part of the top level of the Categories (eg, turning it into a Browse By: Style, Material, Product Type, etc). Selecting one would display a sub list of applicable choices, and selecting that would display a list of all products that matched, plus the opportunity to filter using another of the Browse options... and so on. But my skills don't run to that, so I shall have to do it the hard way until I learn a *lot* more. :rolleyes: "What's the point?" I hear you cry "Can't you just use Categories and duplicate the products all over the place?" Well, yes I could, but then I'd have to put each product there manually, and there'll be lots of places it could go, many of my Browse fields are one-to-many. And think of what would happen if I wanted to update a product, or remove it?! This way I could note on a single product entry that it should appear here, here, here, here & here, and OS could figure out all my permutations of Browse. So, your thoughts please: Is it possible? Is there a better way of doing it? Has someone already done it (cross fingers, I can live in hope) and can give me some pointers? Is there some major flaw in my thinking? Could I expand the idea with just a touch more work? Cheers H PS Having played around with OSC for quite a few weeks now, trialling various contributions, I'm just about ready to rip down what I've done so far & reinstall everything from scratch principally to get everything installed in the right order, so now would be a good time to do anything that needs to be done on a clean install. Oh, and I've just had another thought, I'd probably need to do some hacking with the breadcrumb trail too, to make it show the Browse selections. I guess I could use the Categories feature to do something useful... any obvious problems with manually building the full Browse structure in the Categories with no products & using that to navigate around? That would solve the breadcrumb issue (albeit in not a very elegant way, talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut). Then all I'd need to do is to get each sub category page to display two main panels, one of the remaining Browse options & one displaying the search results for the Browse options already selected... does that sound feasible? Think I'm going to tie myself up in knots with this one, time to do that sleeping on it' that I promised myself ;)' H Oh, and I've just had another thought, I'd probably need to do some hacking with the breadcrumb trail too, to make it show the Browse selections. I guess I could use the Categories feature to do something useful... any obvious problems with manually building the full Browse structure in the Categories with no products & using that to navigate around? That would solve the breadcrumb issue (albeit in not a very elegant way, talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut). Then all I'd need to do is to get each sub category page to display two main panels, one of the remaining Browse options & one displaying the search results for the Browse options already selected... does that sound feasible? Think I'm going to tie myself up in knots with this one, time to do that sleeping on it' that I promised myself ;)' H Oh, and I've just had another thought, I'd probably need to do some hacking with the breadcrumb trail too, to make it show the Browse selections. I guess I could use the Categories feature to do something useful... any obvious problems with manually building the full Browse structure in the Categories with no products & using that to navigate around? That would solve the breadcrumb issue (albeit in not a very elegant way, talk about a sledgehammer to crack a nut). Then all I'd need to do is to get each sub category page to display two main panels, one of the remaining Browse options & one displaying the search results for the Browse options already selected... does that sound feasible? Think I'm going to tie myself up in knots with this one, time to do that sleeping on it' that I promised myself ;)' H Apologies for the multi-submit on my extra thoughts - told you I should sleep on it! :blush:
hannahv Posted November 3, 2005 Author Posted November 3, 2005 What, nobody has any comments? C'mon, *somebody* else must find Categories too restrictive.
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