As an online shop business owner, you need to balance how to give your customers everything they need, against the time and ongoing effort of constantly monitoring, administering and updating the item options on your ecommerce website. Ideally, you would want to give each item it's own set of options (size, colour, finish etc...) but, if you have hundreds of items on your website, each with it's own selection of sizes, colours and finishes, the amount of maintenance involved in keeping your item listings up-to-date becomes a full-time job...
What is the solution? Other online shop website developers have tried to present a solution that combines efficiency with flexibility. Unfortunately, the nature of writing ecommerce software that is designed to serve all holistically, is that it often leaves practical holes for the everyday user. Creating groups of items within a parent item creates yet more maintenance, but the flexibility required. Scaling back the ability for merchants to list fully comprehensive listings, dimisnishes competitive returns in often crowded marketplaces. So, two ends of the spectrum miss the mark. And, neither comes close to addressing the overall issue - how do you provide a solution that enables merchants to update entire swathes of item options simultaneously? How do you provide a solution that offers the merchant the flexibility that their customers reqiuire, and that their products deserve? How do you provide a solution that makes it easy for a merchant to keep his/her online shop up-to-date efficiently, accurately and quickly?
25 years of experience has taught us a few things. There are characteristics to every online shop. Every ecommerce website is built to sell a certain type of product - clothing, electronics, toys etc... Therefore, every online shop has large numbers of item options that appear repeatedly. Clothing shops repeatedly use colours, sizes and brands, for example. We recognise this fact, and have geared our item options systems to match. If you used a different ecommerce website supplier, you could need to set up a 'Sizes' option for each item, and individual sizes for each size option, for each item. There are potentially thousands of variables.
Pocket Book do it differently.
We utilise the repetitive nature of a typical ecommerce website's product ranges to empower the shop owner with a much faster and more efficient item options solution.
To us, the solution was clear. We separated the item options themselves from the items. Unlike with our competitors, with Pocket Book, you don't add an item, add an option to the item, and then add option values to that item's version of that option - creating endless maintenance issues.
With Pocket Book, you add your item options in separately, and they then work across your whole item range. For instance, you can add a 'Sizes' option for your entire website. You can then add in as many sizes ('Extra small, Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL' etc...) as you need for that option. When you add an item to your online store, you can then simply assign that 'Sizes' option to it, if needed... but it gets better... You can also assign as many, or as few, of those sizes ('Extra small, Small, Medium, Large, XL, XXL') to each item, as required. When you update an option, that update cascades through to all of your items automatically. Instead of updating hundreds of item options, or item option values, you just need to update one. You can add as many options, and as many option values, as you need.
This approach, from a simple understanding of the nature of ecommerce websites, creates a unique solution that is a efficient, flexible and provides a powerful solution to the ecommerce website item options issue.
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