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EZ-Catalog, in conjunction with the EZ-Shipping tools, is a fully-featured catalog and online shopping cart. Current customers are selling a wide range of products, ranging from just a few specialty items to catalogs with thousands of items. Some samples of products being sold using EZ-Catalog are hand-blown glass figurines, specialty foods, chocolates, tack supplies, weight training equipment, photography seminars, kites, gold chains, construction equipment, and charitable donations to a name a few. EZ-Catalog should be able to handle any of your online catalog needs.
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Outlined below are the major features of EZ-Catalog:
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- EZ-Catalog is a web-based catalog system. That means that as soon as you make the changes, they are instantly updated in your site's catalog.
- EZ-Catalog will support catalogs of thousands of items and thousands of categories.
- Products can be grouped into categories such as mens clothing and women's clothing. Products can be listed in multiple categories such as their regular categories and items on sale.
- There are three different shopper interfaces to the catalog items available. The interfaces range from a simple order form listing of all your products, to visually rich category listing of products, and finally an EZ-PageBuilder block that can be integrated into a completely customized web page for the product.
- An Application Program Interface (API) is available for those who want to customize the shopper interface beyond the standard three interfaces.
- Each product can have many options such as color, size, and style. These options can be selected from a drop-down list. The options can vary for each product. Valid values for each option can also be specified.
- When used in conjunction with the EZ-Affiliate tools, the EZ-Catalog system can be used to track purchases by affiliates.
- When used with EZ-Checkout, credit card payments can be processed instantly. (Requires a merchant account and gateway. Click for more information.)
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Outlined below are the major options that are availbale from the EZ-Catalog menu:
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Categories are used to organize and group your products into logical groupings for example men's and women's wear. This will make it easier you to find your products and make changes. Categories also help your customers find the right product quickly.
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When you click on the Maintain Categories link you will see a list of all the categories you have established. You will have buttons to add or delete categories. For your convenience, there is also a button to take you directly to the maintain products pages that are discussed below. You can also get a list of all products or a list of those that have not been assigned to a category yet. From the list of categories there are links to edit the category information, view what the category pages will look like on your web site, or view a listing of all the products in that category. Because of the cross references to the product maintenance pages, you can use this area to also work on your products.
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Products are the key element of the catalog system. Using the Maintain Products menu you can add new products or maintain existing products. The first page displays a list of all products, you can easily filter if you have a large catalog. For each product you can specify the descriptions, associated photos and links, what options are available, and valid values. You can also choose the categories a product belongs to.
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As discussed previously, the category display is one of the ways you can display your products on your web site. The catalog configuration allows you to personalize the colors, search keys, and the options to display in the Category display pages. In the Catalog display, all products associated with the selected category are shown. Information about each product are displayed sequentially, with descriptions, pictures, links, and search keys are displayed about each product. These display configurations are similar to those of "Global Information", but only change the look of the catalog.
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As discussed previously, the order form is one of three ways to display your products on your web site. This option shows what the order form will look like on your web site. The order form is the simplest and cleanest way to display all the items in your catalog. All active products will be displayed, grouped by category.
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The download catalog tool allows you to copy all the information in your catalog into a delimited file (comma or other). This file can then be imported into a PC based software package such as a spreadsheet or a database. This would be a way to share your catalog information with other businesses. This is also a very good way to back up the data in your catalog as a safety and security measure.
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The catalog import provides for populating your catalog from a delimited file such as spreadsheet or database. This could be used to create your catalog the first time if you already have the data in some other software package. You might find it easier to maintain your catalog in a PC based program and then regularly upload the data into your catalog. When you import a catalog file, a copy of the data is made prior to replacing it with the imported data. This is the way you can restore that backup data.
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The edit sales tax option creates a table of sales tax rates to be charged on a catalog if the "ship to" address meets the geographic criteria in the table. The geographic areas that can be specified are countries and states/provinces. It is possible to have a two-tiered sales tax. For example, you could specify that both a national sales tax and regional (province) sales tax is to be charged. Regional divisions are only available for the states/provinces of United States, Canada, and Mexico.
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The edit regional settings option allows you to specify the units of measure for currency and weight for your catalog. You can only choose one option each for currency and for weight.
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Specifies the comments that can appear on either the top or the bottom of the Order Form, one of the three catalog display options.
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