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Listing products by supplier, browsing by brand
Question
I want to allow customers to navigate to items by supplier as well as by category. Or I want to allow customers to browse by brand as well as product type. Can I do this?
Answer
Although you can setup suppliers and tag products by them in the back end of CactuShop, this is used only for the purposes of grouping items together on the stock warnings page. It is easier to prepare orders for suppliers if you have all the items that need to be purchased from each supplier grouped together.
If you want to put details of suppliers or manufacturers on the front end of the web site, there are a couple of ways of doing this.
The first is to use CactuShop's multiple category support. Both products and categories can have multiple parent categories which means you can have an item featuring in more than one category.
So if you wanted to allow customers to navigate to products by category or brand, you just need to design your category structure accordingly.
For example, if your site sells sports shoes, you can have two top level categories - "categories" and "brand". Within categories you can have subcategories of "football", "running", "golf" and so on. With brand, you can have "Nike", "Reebok", "Adidas" and so on. A particular Nike running shoe can hence be located in both the appropriate subcategories.
Furthermore, you can add further top level categories if you wish, to allow customers to navigate to men's, women's or children's shoes.
If you have the 'Pro' version of CactuShop, you also have the option of using the attributes system. This lets you set up extra fields for each product such as "brand" which can also be included in the advanced search and the product comparison too.
Once you start working with them, you will find the attributes system and the multiple category support are far more customizable and extensible than the suppliers functionality which is limited to a single selection from a predefined list.