product line support

[M-4]

I'm starting to use Prestashop for a few online stores. Although it has features, brands, suppliers, categories and attributes, I'm still missing something like 'product line'. Here's the use case: imagine I sell clothes and I sell 4 brands: A, B, C, and Z :). Brand Z has several product lines, things like: heavy hipster, creative crawler etc. The names of the product lines are really brand-related: each brand can have several specific lines. How can I make that work properly in Prestashop? Does Prestashop support something like product lines?

Thanks!

[selectshop.at]

You can use features, or you can use brands as categories and than ad sub-categories with the lines you want.

How to use features: http://doc.prestashop.com/display/PS17/Managing+Product+Features

Features you can add as well to the filter options, as by the same as categories and sub-categories, so it is independent, how to realize it.

[M-4]

A feature is not specific to a brand, so that doesn't work very well. Also, a 'product line' is not really a feature...

Brands as categories is an option, but it breaks logic as well:

• brands are not categories (and vice versa)
• a 'brands' menu won't work as expected - there will be no brands, since we only have categories now, unless we duplicate stuff, which is another root of all evil :).

I guess I have to choose one of those two, although both are pretty fragile - would it be very hard to add just the possibility to add a brand to a category? (From information model point of view, it is 1 extra, optional column in the DB, and on the back office, it's 1 extra field in the add/edit category - I agree, some more logic will be necessary when it comes to subcategories, but it seems to me pretty doable)

[selectshop.at]

Sorry I cannot understand why you cannot use features. This is exactly what you want. You can filter for it by using the facetted search. Filter for brand and than filter for the feature: product line heavy hipster. You need to add as feature group product line and than on your products the feature heavy hipster. If a customer choose the brand xyz and than the on box product line heavy hipster, he will find all products for the brand with feature heavy hipster. Give a try and you will see that this is exactly what you are requesting for.

[M-4]

Features _can_ be used, but they break the (UX) logic. At the top bar, I can add a menu item 'brands', which shows all the brands. If I choose a certain brand, I only want to show the the product lines of that brand to the user in the 'product line' filter. As far as I understand, what you propose, whatever brand I choose, I'll always have the same features shown on 'product line'-filter (for the client). For the shop admin, the link between product lines and brands is not clear, which again, from a UI/UX perspective, is not really what I want: one could easily add a certain product line of certain brand to another brand. If it can happen, such (human) errors will happen. A Good UI minimizes these kind of 'logical' errors.

I mean, it _can_ be done, of course, but it doesn't mean that it is the best way to do things - there are (almost) always ways of 'abusing' a system to make it work like you want. I just prefer not to (it always hits you in the face in the long run) :p.

Or: since there is no support for product lines (coupled to brands), I'll need to fallback to a less elegant, more error-prone solution (which will require more maintenance/mental effort).

 

Besides this, I seem to fail to add faceted search to the shop: I added a feature, I added that feature to a product, indexed and rebuilt the stuff, but there's still no search somewhere in the classic Prestashop theme (see empty box in the left column, that's where the faceted search is supposed to show, I guess?). Does the classic (default) prestashop theme supports faceted search? (I have the 2 column layout for the index page)

Edited August 4, 2019 by M-4
clarify issue with faceted search not shown (see edit history)

[M-4]

On 8/3/2019 at 9:32 PM, selectshop.at said:

Sorry I cannot understand why you cannot use features. This is exactly what you want. You can filter for it by using the facetted search. Filter for brand and than filter for the feature: product line heavy hipster. You need to add as feature group product line and than on your products the feature heavy hipster. If a customer choose the brand xyz and than the on box product line heavy hipster, he will find all products for the brand with feature heavy hipster. Give a try and you will see that this is exactly what you are requesting for.

So, I tried this, and it is _not_ exactly what I want:
1. The faceted search doesn't work (see above: empty box, no features groups/filters/... are shown)

2. I want to show selection boxes/drop downs/search boxes at the top which are are dependent on each other: first one is choosing the brand, second one is choosing the product line. The second one should only show the product lines of the selected brand (first selection).

(3. There's a mental mismatch between 'brand' and 'product lines' and 'features groups'.)

[selectshop.at]

For the faceted search you need to configure the filters properly. Play with them and you will see that features are shown as well.

[M-4]

Yeah, well:

1. There is some weird state mgmt if you choose a 2 column layout on the index page (see screencast attached). So I learned: don't use 2 columns on the index page - this is were the features don't always show as expected, depending on the history on how you've been navigating through the shop before. This is really, really weird. I mean, it's completely nonintuïtive.

2. It is possible, I know, but since the link is not really clear between brands and product lines, it is also possible to give a product of brand A and a feature 'product line' of brand Z. That are the things that I actually want to avoid.

Anyway, there are quite some issues, so I'll just fallback to the not-so-elegant solutions and plough my way through it .

Thanks