It’s important to have a robust and easy-to-navigate product creation process. In this article, we will walk you through the steps involved in creating a simple product, from entering basic product information to setting up pricing and inventory levels.
Overview
Here is an overview of the product creation process:
Steps to create a product
Product information that can be added and important details
General information
Images
Grouping and organization
Inventory
Pricing
These are the attributes of a simple product. If you are seeking to create a variable product, go to this guide.
From the Inventory page, go to Products and click on Create Product (top right corner of the page)
Fill out the product information, along with additional details (see below)
Click Save
General information
This section describes the product and its attributes, such as the name, description, private notes, the product brand, suppliers, and the product tax.
Name
You need to add a name to your product to differentiate it from other products and goods and as not get your inventory items mixed up. The name will also help locate the product from the Inventory screen.
Description
You would need as much information about the product as possible. This will not only help you, but it will help others know what the product is and what should be on your listings.
Private notes
Just like the description, this field is a rich text editor where you can enter private information about the product. This can be assembly instructions, manufacturing process, etc.
Brand
The manufacturer, wholesaler, or other vendor for the product.
Supplier
The default supplier you purchase this product from. The supplier field is useful when creating automatic purchase orders from the Low Stock or Forecasting reports.
Tax class
The default product sale tax. This field helps automatically compute and display your margins next to your prices (retail and wholesale)
The product name is a mandatory field. You won’t be able to save the product until a name is defined.
The product description is synced to your sales channels, such as Shopify. Check out the Shopify integration settings document to know more about how the product information is synced with Shopify.
Images
Images show your customers and team members what the product looks like. These give your customer a better understanding of the function and the size of an item and increase your customers’ confidence in the quality of your products.
To upload an image to your product:
Click on Upload Image
Choose a file from your system
The uploaded image will show in the images section
You can drag and drop images to sort them out. The first image is the default image shown on the inventory screen.
Grouping and organization
This section gathers a few useful fields for sorting and classifying your products. These fields are useful for organizing your inventory items and help your team members easily find products.
These are searchable keywords associated with your product. Tags can help you and your team members easily find your products on the inventory screen.
Like tags, the product type is an extra field that helps you organize your inventory items into categories.
These fields can be set in bulk within your Products view. This article section shows you how to navigate into the bulk actions.
Inventory
The inventory section holds attributes and properties tied to your product inventory. This section covers settings related to whether items are tracked or not, product quantities, allocations, and available stock across warehouses.
Available stock
This field represents the total inventory you have available on sale. Available stock = Total Stock – Allocated Stock
Incoming stock
This is the total incoming inventory. This field is computed from Approved and Partially received purchase orders.
SKU
The product stock keeping unit. This is a code that identifies the product within your business. For effective tracking and sales reporting, each SKU should be unique. That said, SKUs remain optional if you choose not to use them.
Barcode
This code consists of bars and spaces and is a machine-readable representation of numerals and characters. This field is useful for looking up your products using a barcode scanner.
Weight
The product’s weight. Product weights must be as accurate as possible as this field is usually used to compute shipping rates.
Alert level
Defines a threshold under which the system will automatically flag this product as low in stock. The alert level is primarily used in the Low Stock report.
Supplier SKU
Similar to the SKU field, the supplier SKU is useful for tracking the product supplier SKU which is used when printing purchase orders.
Quantity to order
The ideal order quantity a company should purchase to minimize inventory costs such as holding costs, shortage costs, and order costs
Continue selling when out of stock
Defines whether this product can be back-ordered or not. This field has two possible options, “No, disallow selling when sold out” and “Yes, continue selling when sold out.”
HS Code
If you want to ship the product internationally, then enter the harmonized system (HS) tariff code. These codes provide customs with information so that correct tariffs can be applied to the order.
Country of origin
The country where the product was manufactured or assembled. If the product consists of materials from different countries or regions, then the country or region where it takes its essential form is the country or region of origin. Different countries or regions and international treaties have different rules of origin.
The HS Code and Country of Origin are hidden by default. Click on Edit Details to view and edit these fields.
Pricing
This section captures information and pricing details of your product. Pricing includes retail, wholesale (applicable if you have a wholesale business), purchase price, and more.
Retail Price
You might want not to track inventory for certain products, for example, low-value products or fast-moving products. This section determines how the system handles inventory updates for this product. This field has two options, “Track product inventory” and “Don’t track inventory”.
Retail Compare At price
This field holds the original item retail price for a product on sale.
Wholesale Price
Similar to the retail price, this is the recommended wholesale price which is useful for recording wholesale orders.
Wholesale Compare At Price
Similar to the Retail Compre At price, this field holds the original wholesale price for a product that is on sale.
Purchase Price
Also known as the “Buy Price”, this field holds the latest known purchase price you paid to get the product from your supplier
Moving average Cost
A dynamic cost value of the product. The system automatically updates this value as you purchase inventory from your suppliers. You can read more about this field here.
Your account is automatically provisioned with two price lists, retail and wholesale. You can create more price lists using the Price Lists module.
Variants
You add variants to a product that comes in more than one option, such as size or color. Each combination of options for a product is a variant of that product.
For example, suppose that you sell T-shirts with two options: size and color. The size option has three values: small, medium, and large. The color option has two values: blue and green. One specific variant of these options is a small/blue T-shirt.
Bundling is a functionality that allows you to group and sell goods together as one finished product; it also automatically calculates and tracks bundle inventory levels, costs and weights as the bundle parts change over time through sales, purchases, and adjustments.
