In this step we'll start adding a few inventory items to our store. This store MauiTouch sells a few artistic items so in this case there are going to be items like paintings and photos as well as some food items.

For best impact, you should also have images of your items to sell. These images should be fairly small (no more than 300 pixels wide ideally so they display nicely in the content area), and should be stored with a descriptive name or better yet the SKU plus the image extension (ie. MYITEMSKU.JPG). The store can pick up larger images and automatically resize them for you if needed. Using the SKU is useful in case you need to automate management of images in the future.

Let's get started. The first thing you'll do is display a list of inventory items which shows a bunch of unrelated items:

These items are added by the new installation by default so that you have some data to look at and play with before having creating your own. In our example, though, we'll start from scratch so let's delete these items. Simply click on the Delete action to remove them all. Your list now show be empty and just show the header and footer bars.

Next click on the Add Item button to create a new item which brings up a form with a lot of empty fields presented in a tabbed interface. The form is empty initially so I'm going to put in some information like this:

This lengthy form contains all information about the Inventory item. Most options should be self explanatory but here's a list of what each field means:

Tabbed Interface:
This form uses a tabbed interface for its many Item settings. Changing tabs does not cause the form to save or submit the data to the server - all the pages are treated as a single page and submitted only when you press the Save button or some of the Refresh buttons on the page.

SKU
This is the primary descriptive Item identifier used to identify an item. Think of the SKU as the Product ID.

Description
The description is the one line description for the item. This is what's displayed by default in item lists and line item displays. This field can be 80 characters long although it's recommended to stay with shorter names so lists don't wrap.

Long Description
This can be a long description for the item and is free form. This field can accept plain text as well HTML markup which is rendered as is.

But be aware that this field is not 'pure' HTML but rather a hybrid HTML field. It takes plain text and automatically adds proper HTML breaks for line breaks and double line breaks (
). Any markup embedded into the field is also used as is and displayed on the page. When adding HTML text be aware that any line breaks in the HTML may cause extra <br> or <p> tags to be inserted which can lead to unexpected spacing in pure HTML pasted from other sources.

Abstract
An abstract is a short description for the item that is displayed in the Inventory display list. This abstract can be used in other places as well to quickly display more information for an item a customer has purchased.

You can automatically generate an abstract with the Create... button which takes the first few paragraphs of the Long Description. Alternately you can type in text in this field as well. The Create All... button allows you to create automatic abstracts for all items in the database that do not already have an abstract.

Manufacturer
This is the company that makes or sells this product. Can be used in reports to isolate sales by company for example. Not used in the online store at this time, but the data is available with the Item data. It is used in the offline app for report grouping.

Categories
This is one or more categories that this item is listed in. The list must be separated by line breaks and the values must correspond to the categories you defined in the previous step. The easiest way to pick categories is by using the list above the field which contains all available categories. Select and click the Add button to add a category. If you remove categories or manually type a category that doesn't exist these categories will simply be ignored.

Sort Order
The Sort order determines in which order items are displayed in lists like the Category Item list. Items with higher numbers sort to the top of any list. Any values with 0 are sorted alphabetically. Use this to prioritize your items. If you merely want your item lists alphabetized leave the SortOrder for all items at 0.

Price, Special Price and Cost
These are the regular sales price, a special price when the item is on sale, and the cost of the item respectively. The most important value is Price which is the value that is used for each item in the store. Setting the List Price is useful if your price is lower than the list price - when this is the case the store will display both the list price (in strike out) and show the discount to the customer. Cost is not used currently but can be used by your own applications that might connect to the data.

Is this a physical item
A physical item is an item that tracks stock quantities. As an item is sold the stock goes down and if an item is out of stock it can't be purchased. If checked the store will track inventory of items. When an item sells and is checked out, inventory levels go down. If a physical item's inventory reaches zero that item can not be purchased any longer.

In some situations you may not be selling physical items. For example, a software shop, or a company selling services will have inventory items that aren't tied to any inventory.

Stock, Items on Order, Expected On
These relate to the current stock level and the items that are on order with an expected arrival date. The latter two values must be manually set and are mainly informational - they're not currently used in the store.

Weight
This is the weight of the item if it is physical and must be shipped. Weight is used to calculate shipping rates. The base store ships with very basic shipping rules, but you can customize these shipping rules to whatever needs you may have by customizing the shipping rules. In most cases shipping rates will be determined by weight of the item.

Hide this item on the Web
In some applications you may have an inventory database that includes service items that are not to be shown on the Web but you still want to have them in the database. For example, you may have a DISCOUNT item that you stick on invoices for customers, or CONSULTING or TRAINING fees that you offer separately but that aren't items you can 'purchase' online directly.

You may also have items that are no longer available or items you don't want to sell over the Web altogether. In all cases you'll want keep the item for showing on the Web and you can simply set this checkbox to keep it from displaying to the public site.

Note that you will still see the items in the inventory listings however.

Image to Display
Images are important for visual impact of items that you sell and this option allows you to specify a URL to an image. Image names specified here should exist in the images/itemimages folder of the Web site. Youc an use sub-paths if you want. For example Paintings\picSunFlower.jpg would be a valid image path.

We recommend that your image name matches your SKU, so items are easily identified, but ultimately you can name images anything you want. Images ideally should be no more than 300 pixels wide (200 or less is better), but again it's your choice.

You can manually copy images into the ITEMIMAGES directory or use the Upload... button to upload the image through the application:

The advantage of using the Upload utility is that it can automatically resize your images for you. Note however that resizing will loose any transparency the image might have!

Product Url
This is a URL to the main info page for this product where the customer can find more complete information. This causes a 'More Info' Url to be added to the end of the product description.

Redirection URL
You can use this URL to automatically redirect an item link to another by specifying another URL. This is useful if you have old item numbers and want those to be pointing at newer versions (for example, WWHELP25 and WWHELP30 should now go to WWHELP40 in the store). This relieves you from having to chase down links from your main Web site that might point at the old items.

Specials Display
Specials are the specials that display on the Home page if you use the SpecialsListing.ascx control. Specials assigned a SortOrder value other than 0 automatically show up in the listing with the SortOrder determining which items displays first.

The Special Header Text and Detail text are similar to the Abstract, but they are to be customized for display on the front page - often times this stuff will be overhyped text about a new item being released etc. so the text here will not be product specific but often news specific. You can also specify a specials price if you want to run a promotion on the item. Currently the store does nothing with this price but the field is here for you to implement this functionality.

Registration Password and Registration Text
If you are working with Software Registrations or online services it's useful to automatically confirm orders when they are completed. The registration password and text can be used to provide download information and unpacking passwords for software. This information is used when you confirm an order from the offline application or the invoice display form.

Email To
Optionally if you sell software for a third party you can have a confirmation sent to the third party contact with this email address. This contact is emailed an XML version of the full invoice which can be imported into other order systems or read directly for order processing.

Commission Paid
This is the total value that is to be paid to a third party for an item. If you sell items on commission sales a typical percentage will be 20-30% which means the commision paid will be 70-80%. The value is entered as a decimal value - ie. 0.70, .80. This information can be used for commission payment reports.

Item can Auto Confirm
This flag is used to determine whether this item can be automatically confirmed by sending a confirmation email. Again this applies mainly to software or services where some sort of unlocking occurs for software or service access. When set the confirmation email is sent. If not set no confirmation email with the registration email is sent for an item sold.

Note that these settings refer to Item confirmations, not the invoice confirmation that always gets sent to the customer when an order completes. These confirmation emails are sent on a per order item basis and only if the order was processed successfully.

Sub Items
The store supports subitems for an item where one item is set up as a master item and other items are created as subitems. A common scenario is a T-Shirt with several sizes and colors where each size and color is a subitem. SubItems are not displayed in the store, instead the master item is shown and you can set up the master item to show the subitems in list format or by providing a custom list display.

Another alternative for 'sub-item' like feature reporting by topics is the use of an Item Type. The Item type forces the store to pick up any custom form fields on the Inventory Long Description and adds those values to the lineitem as an ExtraValue. So rather than managing multiple subtypes for different sizes and colors of T-Shirts you can could have one item and several values that return the size and color.

This somewhat complex topic is covered in the SubItem Support topic.

Related Items
Related items allow you to add links to other items that might be of interest to your customers to the current item. If related items have been added they are displayed in a sidebar as part of the Inventory item display for the customer.

Product Type
A product type can be used to allow special items to appear on a form. For example an item might be a conference item and be of type conf. The user can then create custom HTML input fields that start with 'conf' (such as confAttendee, confMealType etc), which are captured as special fields into the XML Properties field.

XML Properties
Custom XML field that allows storage of custom properties. Used by the business object's GetProperty/SetProperty methods you can store custom data in this field. It's also used for custom types which can capture additional user input based on a form variable prefix.

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Phew - a lot of information. But realistically you only need a few things filled out mainly on the first two pages.

Ok... so for our MauiTouch Web store you can see the settings I've made for the store in the image. I've added a painting to the store, specified a sales price and weight, added it to the Paintings category and attached the picSunflower image. The image was captured from a digital camera, resized to 250 pixel width with PaintShop and then simply stored into the ItemImages directory as picSunflower.jpg.

Click Save Item to write the changes to the database and we now have our first item ready to view.

As a shortcut you can now view this item at:

http://localhost/webstore/item.aspx?sku=PICSUNFLOWER

which will get you:

But let's not get too far ahead but look at Step 5 - Check out the Web Store.