Product Curation?

We're looking to find a simpler way to curate product collections. Right now we're going about it in a couple ways:

  • Someone peruses the catalog, writes down a bunch of product selections, then manually adds them one at a time to a product grid block on a custom page. Very tedious.
  • We're also adding tags at the customer level as a way of letting guest curators create a list of products that we can easily use with advanced search to find the list by tag name and add as manual filling to a product block on a custom page. A little quicker, but you still need to see a product in the product grid, go to the details page, select the Tags tab and type in a collection name - a lot of steps!

We're looking for a more fluid way to make these collections:

  • Ideally we'd be able to do this within the admin console: 1) search for a bunch of products based on a criteria (ie: all have "blue" in the product title), then be able to select a subset from list and edit all at once to add a unique collection name tag to them.
  • Same with data-driven block fillings - you'd be able to define a block that was filled by a tag, rather than have to manually add them. Then you could constantly update the collection by just adding or removing tags.

Why not use wishlists?

Then, just create an addon that would supply a button that could be used to organize/structure the info in whatever way you want. Using a wishlist is an easy way for someone to save a collection of products. The addon would just need to gather and manipulate that data.

If you wanted to just tag products by the curator, then the addon could simply add those tags to the selected products.

As with most things, there are many ways to skin a cat (is this a politically correct statement anymore?). :-)

As far as I know, wishlists only have a single category, so there's no real way to create more than one group at a time. A curator can add a variety of different tags to products as they roll through the collection, making it easy to continually develop and update product groups as new products are added.

Tags can also be used as a search term in the admin console, making it easy to fill product grid or carousel blocks manually. (Would love to have it fill programmatically though!)

Frankly, we'd love to use the wishlist feature if there's was any sophistication to the default add-on. Perhaps I need to take a look at what's out there in add-ons these days.

On MVE, we would love to be able to create data-driven block filling based on criteria like vendor location, or on sale items, or tags, etc. Why can't we access the same power that a simple parameter stuffed URL will give me? Seems like a winner development to me…

Wishlists work by product, not by category. It's essentially a stored cart.

Not sure why you need the category if you have the product.

You can create custom blocks till your heart's content. You can fill them with any logic you want.

How do you envision to motivate customers to add relevant tags to products? A customer may place groups of products in list 1, list 2, list 3. For other customers such tag names would be useless.

Wishlists work by product, not by category. It's essentially a stored cart.

Sorry - by category, I meant one group of products. With tags, each tag name is basically a different group. Using a wishlist means you have to run the entire product collection, add your items, then publish and then start at the beginning again. With tags one can add to a variety of tagged groups at the same time.

You can create custom blocks till your heart's content. You can fill them with any logic you want.

Heh. Well maybe you can - but you're a CS-Cart developer! There's no way for me to do it without getting deep into the code…

How do you envision to motivate customers to add relevant tags to products? A customer may place groups of products in list 1, list 2, list 3. For other customers such tag names would be useless.

In our MVE we see the tags as more of a store admin or product curation tool, to make it easy to create subsets of products. Our shop has about 10K handmade items, all unique. They can be combined to sell in myriad ways for different holidays, events or seasons. Every week we promote a new curated list of products to our customer mailing lists.

Customers should look at tags like having multiple wish lists - they don't just have to put everything in one big unsorted pile - you can add a distinct tag for each person on your shopping list.