Hello,
I am using AbanteCart 1.2.11 for a few weeks and just imported around 140 products from a previous tentative with PrestaShop.
I am the kind of person who likes to get my hands dirty, formatting SQL INSERT queries though a spreadsheet and a code editor.
There were no exceptions this time, and I imported my products through phpMyAdmin.
To create categories, I used AbanteCart's admin.
Here are few ideas coming from my experience with AbanteCart.
1) Please, show SKU everywhere!SKU numbers are my personal product references in my catalog.
These are my product IDs, way more that the product ID that AbanteCart's gives to products.
I mostly sell spare parts, and most of them have a model.
But the SKU remains the reference that uniquely identifies a product in my inventory (Excel file, a.s.o.). Even the picture names of my products contains the SKU.
I assume that also for those of you selling new items in quantities, the SKU is of vital importance.
Currently, that my products (identified by their SKU) and their prices were imported, I still need to write their name in three languages, and to upload their images.
I applied this
quick-fix temporary solution of duplicating the SKU in the "model" field using this SQL query:
UPDATE `ac_products` SET model=sku WHERE (model='' AND sku!='');
It is the only way for me to know who is who.
To my opinion, the SKU should be displayed at the following locations:
- as a column in the products list
, preferably between the product thumbnail and the "name" field.
- at top of the General tab, right to the cloning button
- at top of the Media tab, and of all other products tabs, at a similar location (top left).
The SKU being the "instant identifier" of a product, I suggest these locations in the tabs rather than in the product information header, so that the SKU is more highlighted.
2) Attach a product to a category directly from the product list.After importing my products, I had to attach them manually to the categories for my AbanteCart shop (which were different from those that I had in Prestashop).
I had to open two tabs in phpMyAdmin, first one with the view described in my answer to Old-Paul about
bulk moving products to a different category, and second one showing the records of the 'category_description' table.
By comparing, I could manually edit the category IDs in the first tab, but it was painful.
I would suggest a one character wide droplist in the product list, that upon click would expand itself like a popup, Ajax-load categories, and let pick one. The categories could be listed in a classical drop list, or expandable tree.
A good location for the one-char-wide droplist could be beween the checkbox and the product thumbnail.
3) Add an EAN13 column in the backend, and structured data in the frontend.
Nowadays, EAN numbers as well as structured data (JSON-LD) are essentials to e-commerce.
I would really suggest adding a column for an optional EAN13 number in the main product table as a core feature.
Maybe I missed something, but I could not see JSON-LD data as native in AbanteCart.
There is in the market place a "SEO Rich Snippet Microdata for Products" extension that I didn't test.
Prestashop offers natively a field for EAN (as well as a few ones like ISBN which is limited to books).
I'm not in favor of increasing the number of fields excessively, but EAN sounds to me like a "must have".
4) Save and directly jump to next translation.When saving a new product, if the shop is multilingual, I would appreciate two buttons: "Save" and "Save and jump to next tranlation".
So, after saving, one could directly be directed to the fields in which to edit the next language without having to select the language in the drop list and wait again that everythings loads.
5) If there are few languages: bar of toggle butttons instead of drop list.I am aware this would increase code complexity, and reduce the core principle of AbanteCart's scalabily unless the drop list remains, but most shops are likely in just a few languages. In the admin, a bar of toggle buttons rather than a drop list would bring some gain of performance when editing products, categories, a.s.o.
6) Don't resize and don't rename the main product imagesAll my images are pre-processed and optimized (size, compression, ...) depending on the level of detail needed.
The automatic resizing of pictures to a size of 500 pixels is very painful and makes the zoom-scroll feature almost useless.
Make the resize optional with a toggle button in "System > Settings > Appearance" (set on "Off" by default) near to the suggested image size.
For users that upload unoptimized images, a dialog box could be fired, suggesting a resize and asking them if they accept it.
I will detail this idea more in detail below.
7) Older dashboard pictures were betterIt is a personal opinion, but I find the dashboard pictures from version 1.2.11 better than those of version 1.3.4.
Although a bit old-fashioned, they were clearer than those of version 1.3.4.
They were more intuitive, without the need for some further cerebral decyphering.
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