Product types and attributes

Product types are groups of products that share the same attributes. For example, books are typically distinguished by such attributes as ISBN, author, publisher, cover type, language; apparel can be characterized by brand, season, material, etc.

With the help of product types and attributes you can specify additional information on product details pages, as well as keep some private details that you don’t want to share with your customers (e.g. net cost) in your Ecwid admin.

Using product types and attributes

Besides displaying the additional information about products in your storefront, product types and attributes can be helpful in keeping some service information about products in your Ecwid admin and enhancing the search in your online shop with product filters.

Keeping private information about products

With the help of hidden product attributes you can keep product specifications that you use for internal purposes in your Control Panel without publishing them online, e.g. you can use them as cost price field, place for manufacturer’s codes, etc.

To mark an attribute as hidden:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Product Types.
2. Select the type to which the attribute belongs.
3. Choose Do not show for this attribute:

Now the value that you add for this attribute will be visible in your Control Panel only:

You can use the values of your custom attributes in reports by exporting them with the help of Ecwid API.

Searching products by attributes

This is quite important for many merchants to provide an easy way to navigate their inventory, especially in those stores that accommodate large multi brand catalogs. With the help of attributes you can offer product filtering that allows shoppers to refine searches by attribute values, for example, a brand, a material, and more.

Eliminating products from search results

If you have hidden products and categories in your catalog, you may have already noticed that items from disabled categories still appear on the search results pages.

With the help of hidden product attributes you can add special tags to the products that will be used in a custom JS code based on Ecwid API and define whether the product should be searchable.

Showing net product weight

In your store you might sell products that should be packed very properly before shipping (e.g. fragile items). In this case there can be a considerable difference between the weight of your product with and without packaging. Values from the Weight field on the General tab of the product page in your Ecwid admin are used to calculate shipping rates, so you should put the maximum possible weight (“with” packaging) there, to avoid pricing errors. You can hide or show this field in your storefront by choosing the respective option for the Weight box in Design, Sidebar section in your Ecwid admin.

To display weight without packaging on the product page (i.e. net product weight) for your customers, you can use product attributes. Just create an attribute named “Weight (without packaging)”, enter your value and choose Show on the Manage Attributes page.

Creating product types and attributes

Product types

By default, all products in your catalog belong to the General type. To segment products internally you can add as many other product types as you need and add different attributes to these types. Example:

Type: Books Attributes: ISBN, publisher, language, age limit, cover.
Type: Apparel Attributes: gender, season, material, length. 

To create a new product type:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Settings → Product Types.
2. Click Add New Product Type.
3. Use the search bar to find matching types in the drop-down:

4. Select one of the suggested product types and click Add.

Now you can edit the attribute fields to provide your customers with extra details about the products of this type.

Product attributes

By default each product type has two popular attributes:

• UPC (unique product identifier which is called EAN in Europe, JAN in Japan and ISBN for books)
• Brand 

You can edit their names (for example rename “Brand” to “Author” for books) and choose if you want to show them in the product details:

Use the empty attribute fields for specifying additional details about the products of this type and click Add new for extra fields:

To change the order in which the attributes will be displayed in the product details, drag and drop the fields:

When you have set up the list of attributes you are going to display, remember to save your work. Now you can assign types to the products and fill in attribute values.

Assigning types and attributes

To define type for a product and add attribute values:

1. From your Ecwid admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. Click on a product to edit its details.
3. Switch to the Attributes tab:

4. Click Change type and select the required product type:

5. Fill in the attribute values:

6. Click Save.

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