Designing the Product hierarchy, some questions

Hello forum members,



We are just starting preparations to move our current website over to CS-Cart. Including a whole host of new items it will total about 12000 items. For now in catalog setting, no online sales.



I would like to know more about the best practices surrounding Product hierarchy before we make some time-costly mistakes



Background information

  1. Our product hierarchy at its lowest level is based around x number of configurations per Model. So Model 'Boda on round rose' will have:

    1-4 text blocks

    1-4 pictures

    1-2 technical drawing

    1-2 PDF's (downloadable)

    17 unique item numbers/configurations. For example: http://www.artitec.c…kel/198484/rose

    4 languages (English, Dutch, German, French)



    Question: how should we prepare our data (Excel)? Or are there better ways in organizing such data?


  2. At this lowest level, we show icons in order to facilitate choosing the correct configuration. We would prefer to maintain them, if at all possible without loads of custom programming.



    Question: Is this possible? Is it desirable from an administration perspective?


  3. Our current solution only allows a Model to appear in 1 location within the database. If we want to show up in multiple places on the website we have to copy the data to other branches in the database… The cs-cart website [url=“http://onlinelighting.com.au/”]Australian Online Lighting Store | Online Lighting is showing the same Item/Model in different places. My assumption is that this is achieved through tags/…



    Question: if we want a Model to appear multiple times on the website, how should we design/prepare our data for this?


  4. How many Product levels is considered best practice? We now have up to 7 levels from Home screen to Model-group level. Which is far too many for the modern impatient webvisitor



    THank you in advance for any help and insight



    Regards,

    Olof