Note: "Levels" are only used by the Order Manager when uploading information about your products to Altura International or to Froogle. If you use the Stone Edge ECom Assembler (our Web catalog building program), and you have the Order Manager configured to share data with the ECom Assembler, the Order Manager will use the Categories, Subcategories, Groups and page assignments that you have already set up in the ECom Assembler.
You can create a 3-level hierarchy of Categories, Subcategories and Groups ("levels") to help organize your product line. You can then assign each product to one or more of those levels.
When the Order Manager exports product information to Altura International or to Froogle, it must include information to help categorize your products.
Froogle only accepts a single category for each product. That information can come from the Order Manager's Category field or from one of several other fields. It can also come from the Levels screen discussed here. In that case, the Order Manager will look for a Group assignment for each product. If none is found, it will look for a Subcategory that the product is assigned to. If no Subcategory assignment is found, it will look for a Category assignment. It will send to Froogle the first of those that it finds.
Altura International accepts multiple level assignments per product. Each product can be assigned to any number of Categories, Subcategories and/or Groups, and all of those assignments will be sent to Altura. If you do not need multiple levels, you can skip this step and just fill in the Category field for each product with its appropriate information.
To access the Levels screen, go to the Inventory & Suppliers tab of the Maintenance Menu and click Levels.
Notice that there are similar areas on the screen for Categories, Subcategories and Groups.
To preserve compatibility with the Stone Edge ECom Assembler, there are a lot of fields on the Levels form that most Order Manager users will not need. For use with Froogle and Altura, you only need to create your levels and assign products to them. None of the other data on this screen is required.
Start by creating your first category. Click Add under the Category heading. Fill in the name for that category, then click Save. No other information about the Category is required.
To create a subcategory, select the category that it will belong to, then click Add under the Subcategory heading.
To create a group, select the category and subcategory where it will go, then click Add under the Groups heading.
To assign products to a level, select the category, subcategory or group to which you want to assign the products and then click on the Product Assignments tab:
Use the controls on the left-hand side of the tab to filter the list of Available Products.
To assign a product to a level, either select the product in the Available Products window and click Add to Page or simply double-click the product.
To remove a product from a level, select the product in the right-hand list and click the Remove button.
To copy or move one or more products between two pages, click Move Products Between Pages at the top of the Categories, Sub Categories & Groups screen (see image at the top).
Select a category, subcategory or group in the lists on the left-hand side of the form. Then select a different category, subcategory or group on the right-hand side.
Use the Move and Copy buttons on the bottom half of the screen to move or copy products from one level to the other.
Use the other buttons to change the sort order of the products in each level. The sort order is only applicable to the ECom Assembler not Froogle or Altura. The ECom Assembler uses the sort order when it builds Web pages for each level and needs to know the order in which to list the items on each page.
See Also
Inventory
7/7/10
