Helping Sell Your Product

7 Mar 2011

I had a quick heads up with the development team last week here at OpenCRM. It’s good news for users of the Products module, offering you some great new tools. These can be linked to your online shop or Ebay account and could be a great asset in helping you present your goods online.

You can set product categories as suit the needs of your organisation. On creating a new product, you will initially be asked to set the product type. Once you have selected a product category, the edit screen will be set with all the conditional fields associated with that category.  These conditional fields

are the custom fields you have set up which enable you to input data specific to the product groups.

To give you a couple of examples, setting up a product category “Paint” would then give you access to custom fields you have created that are relevant e.g. Colour and Type of Paint. Selecting the category “Nails” would enable access to custom fields such as Length and Type of Nail. This not only simplifies the product creation process but creates a product list that is archived according to category.

So we now have a useful tool whereby the first step in creating of a Product record filters the fields on the next screen to display custom fields that are relevant to that product.

The second development in the Products module involves the Mini-Description of a product. Mini-Description is a field which is automatically populated with information from other fields when you save the product. This is most useful when you have a need to build a concise description of a product, using values that have been selected in other fields, especially where there are many fields and only some values are relevant to this specific product.

Using our earlier example, selecting the category “Paint” gives you access to the fields specific to Paint. You would enter the data – a red paint, emulsion, a 500ml tin, from the manufacturer “The Acme Paint Company”. On saving the mini-description according to the values you have selected would display “Manufacturer: The Acme Paint Company; Tin Size: 500ml; Colour: Red; Paint Type: Emulsion”.

The Mini-Description field is a common field meaning it can be used in searches and results, giving you the tools to list your products according to description. This can then be saved as a report, or exported to your eCommerce tools. As you can see these small but powerful tools can help save your business time as well as help structure the way your product records are kept.