Manufacturers Link to Product Categories (11)
I've seen other ecommerce platforms allow you to add product categories and then associate those categories with specific brands. So if you chose a Manufacturer like Nike and had categories like Running Shoes and Basketball Shoes. You could then send customers to a Manufacturer page for Nike and the linked categories would automatically display. A work around currently requires me to create a manufacturer attribute and then hard code into a widget the manufacturer link. This is a major flaw as hard coding is never a safe solution. This will make it much easier to create a site with many different categories. Also, it will allow customers to shop by brand more easily. Download a demo of 3dcart to test this. I really don't like 3dcart they do this on thing better so AC can come up with a way to do it based on their methods.
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The sub categories would also be able to be shown once drilled down. Attributes just take too long to generate. If linked correctly from Manufacturer page to Product Categories this would save me hundreds of hours of development...since I have hundreds of categories. 0 -
My workaround is to create a "shop by brand" category structure. I take every item in its normal category(s) and replicate it with a "shop by brand > BRANDNAME" prefix. I then 301 my manufacturer pages in AC to the shop by brand page. This lets me get much better navigation including sub categories and attributes here is an example of a shop by brand page that we have the manu page 301 to: http://www.projectorscreen.com/store/c/1205-Da-Lite.html 0 -
If it was me who had designed the software for AmeriCommerce I would have made it so that all product that had a manufacturer attached to them would be able to be organized by product type and collection. Basically it should do it on the fly. I'm not sure if any ecommerce sites do this out of the box but one way to do this is to create 2 category structures. The first being a category for product type and 2nd for category collection. So if you were selling Running Shoes it would be product type: Running Shoes and category type Nike Running Shoes...plus a sub category might be Cross Trainers, Marathon, etc. Then if you associated the product with the other 2 categories when you clicked on Nike it would allow you to filter down to chose different types of Nike followed by specific collections within the product categories. Not sure if that makes sense...but basically having to create hundreds of categories to get it to look this way is not efficient. 0 -
Your method works but if you had 20 manufacturers with each who had 20 products now instead of creating 400 categories I will physically have to create an additional 400 for a total of 800 categories. I think that Shopify and 3dcart both handle this process much better. Specific Shopify requires you to choose a product type when creating a product. 0 -
Andrew, I do it all formulaically within Excel; it doesn't take a whole lot of time, it just becomes another manual process to maintain. We are actually working on a new module for CartSync which will automatically create these new directories within a "Shop by Brand" category structure and synchronize to the items normal category path, I will post more here once it is available to the public. 0 -
** Hey AC; what about allowing Browse By Attribute on the Manufacturer pages? This would then allow us to make these pages useful, instead of an unfilterable list of all skus from that brand
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Hi, looks like Brian's question is a bit older... I'd love to know if this ever got implemented though! It would be very helpful for us.
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Nope, still doing it via redirects
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Bummer. But thanks for the speedy reply!
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