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Guide: Building your catalog

How an Allmoxy catalog fits together: categories, products, attributes, parts, pricing, validations, bundles and the bulk tools, with links to the steps for each.

Your catalog is the list of things customers can order and the rules behind each one. A category tree organizes it, a product asks the customer questions called attributes, parts work out what each product is made of, a pricing formula turns the answers into a price, validations catch answers you can't build, and components bundle products together. This guide shows how the pieces fit and links to the steps for each.

Applies to: shops building or maintaining a catalog. Every catalog page needs the Manage Catalog permission, and all of them live under Settings (gear) > E-Commerce.

In this article

Plan before you build

A smaller catalog that launches sooner is worth more than a complete one that is never quite ready.

  • Start with your bestsellers. Build the configurations, finishes and styles that make up most of your orders first, and add niche options later. Order history is the best guide to what belongs in phase one.
  • Decide what "done" means for phase one and build to that before taking on changes. Most delays come from scope that keeps moving.
  • Write your pricing down first. Every product needs a formula, so missing or inconsistent pricing is the most common thing that stalls a build.
  • Keep one person in charge of the catalog on your side, so decisions don't get remade.
  • Test with a small set of products and real orders before you open the catalog to customers.

Categories: what customers see first

Customers land on your order page and see your top-level categories, click into one for its sub-categories, and then see the products inside. A product can sit in more than one category, and anything you're still working on can be kept out of sight by making it exclusive to your own company.

Learn more: Categories: organize what customers see.

Products and attributes: the questions customers answer

A product is one sellable item. Its Product Info settings say what it's called, whether it's for sale, how it sorts and how it's classed for accounting. Its attributes are the questions on the order page: a dropdown for wood type, a number for width, a checkbox for hinge drilling. Attributes are shared definitions, so one "Wood Type" attribute can be used on every product that needs it, and any product can override an attribute's options or defaults for itself alone.

Learn more:

Parts: what the product is made of

Behind every product sit its parts: stiles, rails, panel, hinges. Each part has formulas for its sizes and quantity, the supplies it uses and the output pages it prints on. Parts are what your cut lists, labels and exports are built from, and they feed numbers (total square feet, lineal feet) into pricing.

Learn more: Parts: how a product is calculated.

Pricing, weight and validations

The Pricing tab holds named formula sections that are added together to make the price; the Weight tab works the same way for weight. Validations are rules that check the customer's answers and either warn them or stop the order.

Learn more:

Bundles and shop-only products

  • A component bundles existing products with their answers filled in, sold as one line.
  • An internal use product is hidden from customers but your team can add it to any order, which is how you handle design fees, freight, installation or a one-off setup charge.

Learn more:

Working faster: clone, bulk edit, import and export

Clone a product instead of starting from scratch, change a setting on many products at once with the Product Updater, and move a whole product between Allmoxy sites with export and import.

Learn more:

Things to know

  • Each product editor tab saves on its own. Attributes, Pricing, Parts, Part Summations, Weight, Validations, Labels and Help Info are separate forms. Save the tab you're on before moving to the next.
  • Deleting is rarely the answer. Products, categories and components can be discontinued instead, which keeps them out of the catalog without losing their setup. If you do delete something by mistake, contact support; deleted items can usually be restored.
  • Attribute formula names never change. Rename the display name freely, but the formula name set when an attribute was created stays, because formulas and saved orders refer to it.
  • A pricing or weight formula that fails its check won't save. Parts save first and then show their errors, so reopen the Parts tab after saving to catch them.