Adding manufacturers and manufacturer categories

So you have decided that having the option of organizing your products by manufacturer is right for your business. This really quick and simple recipe will show you how.

You just need to decide if you are going to configure only manufacturers or manufacturers and categories. If your store only uses a few manufacturers or even a fairly large range of manufacturers then you probably don't need to define or separate them into categories.

If your manufacturers come from a diverse range of product types or are quite numerous, then manufacturer categories are almost certainly a good idea. You can organize the categories in almost any way you like. The trick to ensuring effective organization is to think about how they could be most useful to your customers.

Here are a few typical scenarios to help you think about the best strategy for your store.

The following is an example of a flat manufacturer's structure.

If you are selling laptops and nothing but laptops there is probably a really good case for a flat manufacturer structure. There are likely not dozens of laptop manufacturers in a typical laptop store and, in this context, all do the exact same thing, manufacture laptops. So no manufacturer categories would probably be appropriate.

The following is an example of a typical structure using categories.

Assume that you expand your laptop shop to sell laptop bags and consumables. The number of manufacturers will obviously grow and their nature becomes more diverse. Shoppers might like to browse by manufacturer, but if they are looking for laptop bags, they might not be able to easily distinguish between laptop bags, consumables or laptop manufacturers. Creating categories of manufacturers, consumables, laptops, and bags will certainly make their browsing more pleasing and, therefore, make a purchase more likely.

The following is an example of a vast manufacturer structure.

Now imagine you open a wholesale site and you expand to sell everything computing from screen wipes, through components, to custom built server systems. All of a sudden the situation has changed in two ways. First, you now have a manufacturer base numbering at least in the hundreds, and second, your typical shopper has changed. A wholesale purchaser might be very familiar with who manufactures what. Now it might be best to organize your manufacturer categories alphabetically.

How to do it...

If you have decided you do not need manufacturer categories, skip ahead to adding manufacturers. To add manufacturer categories, follow these steps:

1. In the VirtueMart control panel click on the Manufacturers menu and then the Manufacturer categories link.
2. Now click on the New button in the top right of the Manufacturer categories area. The page looks like the following screenshot:
   
3. Now add the category title and a brief description of what manufacturers the category will contain.
4. Click on the Save and Close button. Now repeat the preceding process for all your categories. Here is what our Manufacturer categories page looks like after we have implemented the simple category structure example described earlier:
   

Adding manufacturers:

1. In the VirtueMart control panel click on the Manufacturers link.
2. Now click on the New button. Notice on this screen you have two tabs. One is for the majority of what we need to fill in, the Description tab, and the other is for uploading images, if you wish to, the Image tab. The following screenshot is of the Description tab:
   
3. Enter the manufacturer's name in the first box. Leave the Published option checked to Yes. The Manufacturer SEF Alias field will be covered fully in Chapter 6, Killer SEO, but if you are confident about defining a search friendly URL now, then go ahead.
4. If you have chosen to define manufacturer categories, go ahead and choose the appropriate category in the Manufacturer category Name drop-down box. Otherwise skip this step.

The next two options shown in the following screenshot are worth considering a little:

As the labels make clear, this is where you can put a link to the manufacturer's website and a contact e-mail address. If you have a special relationship with a niche manufacturer, then you might be confident adding the details. If so, add them now. More likely you might want to skip these two options because sending your customer off to some faceless big corporation's website might well be the last you see of them. Equally, unless you have special reason to do so, you probably want them to e-mail you with queries, not the manufacturer. Moving on:

1. Paste your pre-prepared manufacturer's description into the Description box. Click on the Images tab.
2. At first sight this might look like a fairly complex page. Most of the options are for future management of your images and selecting pre-uploaded images. All we need to do now is scroll to the bottom of the page until we see the following box in the screenshot:
   
3. Just click on Browse..., find the appropriate manufacturer image and upload it. Now click on Save and you can fill out the last couple of fields.

   Tip

   If you accidentally clicked on Save and Close instead of Save, just open up the manufacturer you were working on by selecting it from the list.

   The last optional bits of information are to add a subtitle to your image or image alt text for visitors to your site who browse on text-or speech-based browsers. Adding this is also useful for search engines identifying the nature of your image. The following screenshot is what you're looking for:

   
4. Click on Save and Close. Repeat the preceding steps until you have entered all your manufacturers.

For displaying your manufacturers to your customers, use the following steps. If you followed the setup recipes in Chapter 1, Setting Up Shop, then you already have a Manufacturers category box in the bottom left of your store front:

1. Click on the Manufacturers category box to expand it and then choose a manufacturer or manufacturer category.
2. If you need to display the manufacturer category box, here is how to do it. From the Joomla! top menu choose Extensions | Module Manager. Now click on New and choose VirtueMart Manufacturers from the pop-up menu. The page looks like the following screenshot:
   
3. Just enter a title for your new module in the field labeled Title and choose a position by clicking on Select Position. Selecting position-4 will put your new manufacturer categories module in the bottom left of your site. The page looks like the following screenshot: