Create & Update Product Information
This document explains how Product is defined on OElite Platform.
On OElite Platform, we have many flexible ways of managing products. Depending on your business nature, product range and how you manage your stock, you can always find a convenient solution to manage them effectively.
The basic understanding of a product is an item that you can sell in your business.
We have 3 types of products that can be defined when you create a product:
- Physical product: this is the most commonly used product and default product type. You are mostly likely to use this product type if your business sells physical products such as clothes, electronics, anything that's phsycially available.
- Digital product: If your business sells virtual items, digitized items such as eBooks, training videos in digital formats, downloadable files etc.
- Service product: If your business is in the service industry, you can create your services as product by selecting this product type.
The product types do not have direct impact on how you manage the product's other information, such as descriptions, pricing, picture etc. However they will have different real world differences when customers making orders.
For example, when customers buying a physical product, in most cases you would be requiring customer to provide contact details, shipping details and ordering item quantities, etc. The shipping cost may vary depending on the product quantity or weight etc defined by your business. Whereas for digital products, there'll be no requirements of physical shipping details hence no further requirements of tracking physical shipping/deliveries etc. For service products, there'll be certain level of service agreements that is required to be done only after the service is being delivered or completed.
It's common that the products you sell may share similar sets of product attributes which can be concluded as a product template for eaiser management & organisation of product information.
OElite Platform allows you to configure a set of product templates (Product Specification & Templates ) where you can define the product attributes so that all attributes can be automatically mapped without having to configure each time when you add a new product.
Depending on the types of selling products, also how you manage your customer's purchase, you may create two different ways of product pricing on OElite Platform:
- Fixed Price: this is the pricing type for most products as it's simple and straight forward pricing strategy.
- Subscription Price: this is a pricing type which is commonly used for selling products that are being periodically renewed or re-purchased. If you sell physical products, you may use subscription price type if you deliver the product periodically to the customer so they don't have to keep making repeating orders manually; Subscription pricing type is widely used in service and digital product businesses as they commonly require renewals for customers who use their services or digital products.
To comply with taxation regulations in all countries, we require a compulsory tax category to be associated with all products created in the system. However how you create the tax category, and how you set the tax rate per tax category are all flexible and totally controlled by you. We recommend you to always check your default Tax Categories and Tax Rates Settings first before creating any products.
BOM is a way of defining a product structure, which allows business to compose multiple items (raw materials, assemblies) into a final end product. This feature is typically useful for manufactures who not only purchases resources for manufacturing products, but also use products they manufactured for creating further refined products.
When a product is created as BOM enabled product, this product can then be further defined by selecting multiple existing products as its sub-assemblies. If the BOM product is also marked as End Product on OElite Platform, it will not be available for other BOM products as sub-assemblies.
When a product comes with various options/attributes (e.g. colours, sizes, etc), each combinations of those option values defines a very specific variant of that product. When you sell a 'product', the product has to be precise to a unique definition so it can be purchased without confusion.
For example, when you by "Nike React Pegasus Trail 4" (shoe), you cannot buy without specifying the size and colour. In this situation, "Nike React Pegasus Trail 4" is a Product you define, and each combination of colour & size makes the product purchasable, and we call each of the defined combination (colour + size) as a variant of the product.
For products that are defined by variants, you can manage the stock of each variant in inventory control.
An end product is a finished product that can be sold directly to the market. In most cases, you would select this if the product you are selling is simple product that has a unique SKU (such as a t-shirt specifically defined with a barcode). However if you have many variants for a 'product' you want to define, you are not defining an End Product.
If you wish to create product variants (regardless 1 or many) and bundle them into one product definition, make sure to uncheck "Is End Product" checkbox for the product when creating/updating the product.
On OElite Platform, we have built various flexible ways of managing stock levels for your products. Based on our 2022 survey, more than 80% of business do not have a strict inventory control in place before started using OElite Platform. It is highly recommended that you start working up how you manage your stock levels in your business to maximise the benefits of busienss automation and AI features we build in OElite Platform that can help you to monitor, track and analyse your stock levels and sales performance.
OElite Platform is very flexible and open to whever way you manage your stock:
- Strict Stock Control: By enabling "Stock Control" at product level, you choose to use accurate stock level checks for the product. This means when customers buying from your online shop or in-store through ePOS system, the order will not be able to proceed if there's insufficient stock available in the system.
- Flexible Stock Control: By disabling "Stock Control" at product level, you are defining a product that is not stock controlled. This basically means the product is always in stock, this is commonly used by digital products and service products as there availability can be always unlimited.
- Flexible Out of Stock: If you enabled "Stock Control" for a product, however wish to have flexibility to mark a product (or variant) to be out of stock even though there are stock available, you can use "Force Out Of Stock" feature for the product or product variant.