Hi,
I’m trying to setup my new redesign with a single page setup for listing products but still retaining the sub-category groupings.
I run a store which sells merchandise for bands.
Each Root category is a band’s name. Each sub-category is the type of product they sell, CD’s, T-shirts, Posters, etc. We have about 50 bands and each band links directly to their root category rather than to the whole cs-cart shop, so it operates more as individual shops rather than one big mall type shop. Customers can still buy from multiple bands if they go browsing the store but obviously bands just want to send their fans to their own merchandise so that’s how they link to our shop.
PROBLEM
With the standard cs-cart setup, each Sub-Cat is listed as a thumbnail at the top of the page and the customer has to click and reload a new page to view the products under that sub-category. When there’s only a couple products for that sub-category, it’s overkill to have them reload a new page to view those products.
The other way is to just list everything under the root category and use the Pos. ID number to group them but it still creates a single block of products which can be confusing when there’s similar artwork across different product types. It makes for long product titles to explain this product is a T-shirt and that one is a CD.
SOLUTION
It would be much better to have a single page on the Root category which lists all the products available but divided into groups based on which sub-category they belong too using a
I see this as an alternative Grid layout and should be an option available when selecting how a category will display, Grid, list, ‘single page’ so it doesn’t default every category on the site, only those which have this particular ‘single page’ view selected in admin.
Example of how a single page would be:
BAND’S NAME (root category)
------------------------------------
Description…
T-SHIRTS (sub-category header)
--------------------------------------------
product | product | product
product | product | product
CD’s (sub-category header)
--------------------------------------------
product | product | product
POSTERS (sub-category header)
-------------------------------------------
product | product
It would make for a better layout if customers could just load 1 page and find the product they want by scrolling down rather than having to load new pages or view all products grouped together.
When there’s multiple products that have similar artwork/thumbnails this would keep them grouped and easily viewable so the thumbnail doesn’t have to work to explain what type of product it is.
Is it a t-shirt or a CD? We have to write that in the product title and have clear thumbnails showing it’s a t-shirt and not a CD. This wouldn’t be necessary if they were looking at the products grouped under separate headers. We can just focus on making the best thumbnail featuring the artwork and they can view full images of the t-shirt as extra images on the product detail page.
This is something i’d really like to see as an official option from cs-cart but i’d also like to discuss what it would take to implement as a mod in the meantime.
Is this something a Pro-Customiser would be interesting in working on for me? I’m happy to pay and i’m sure there would be others who would like this setup for their stores so it might be a good addition to any Mod store.
Thanks for reading!