How to
Manage Products

Creating products as a vendor using House of Assets is super easy. After your vendor completes the registration process and is fully verified, they can easily create products and customize them from an intuitive dashboard.

Create a product from the Vendor dashboard

To create a product, navigate to the vendor dashboard, click on Products from the left menu, and then click on the Add New Products button at the top right corner.

You’ll get a new window where you will be able to create a new product giving all the details only.

Basic Details

The common information about a product are the title, price, description. Discount price is optional. You can even schedule discounts for a certain amount of time. You can enter a starting date and end date to apply automatic discounts to your product.

If you leave both price fields empty, the site will replace the price area on the product page with a POA button. Clicking this will open up a basic email form and you will be send an email containing name, email, product URL they are enquiring about.

Images

You can upload multiple product images, these do not need to be a specific shape but do need to be in a certain file format (jpg, png, gif) and can’t be bigger than 100mb. See our guide on Product Photography.

Select Category

Each picture needs to be within a category so it’s catalogued correctly in the front end of the site. Vendors need to select the category from the drop-down.

Categories have to be created by the House of Assets admin team. The vendor can only select them from the frontend dashboard because allowing the vendors to create categories might result in duplicates.

Selecting Product Type

Simple Product

These types of products are simple and have no variants. They are single, standalone products that do not require any other information to define different variants.

Variable Product

A variable product is a product that has different types of variants. For example, you might want to sell a piece of art that is available with or without a frame or may come in a few sizes. So this option will enable you to add these variations as needed. See further down on how to set up the Variables.

Product Descriptions

Short Description

The short description is shown under the Product title, this is used to give an overview of the product.

Description

This is shown below the product photo, title, price area and is the first tab. The main description is used to give a full description of the product, this can be a in-depth as needed.

Inventory

If you do not need to add stock quantity and yours is just a simple product, then you can totally skip this section.

What is SKU?

SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit. It should be a unique set of characters which will not match to any other product.

Enable Product Stock Management

Let’s say you have 10 pieces of the product and you don’t want to receive after orders are placed for 10 units. If you enable stock management and enter 10 in the quantity field, then after 10 units are ordered, this product will show a message that all the quantities are sold and there is no stock.

But, you might want to take some pre-orders before your next batch comes up. So you can Allow Back Order to let the customers place orders even if the product is out of stock.

Shipping

When you setup your store you would have setup default shipping but each product can override this if needed. HoA will in the future offer shipping as a service, but until this is ready to launch, vendors will need to setup their own shipping costs. At the moment the House of Assets site is only available in the UK and allows shipping in the UK only.

To learn how to setup add shipping prices, visit this page.

Attributes

Attributes help setup your product within the product filters. If you do not use attributes, your product will not appear in filteres searched. If you click on the dropdown menu you will see the below options:

For example, if you’re uploaded an art piece you would select the Attributes that start with the word Art. The options are:

For Art

• Condition
• Era
• Signature
• Size
• Style
• Supplied
• Technique

For Vehicles

• Model

For Alcohol

• Age Statement
• Country of Origin
• Distillery / Bottler
• Size
• Strength
• Style
• Vintage

For Jewellery

• Material
• Type

For Property

• No. of Bedrooms
• Sale type
• Type

For Sports Memorabilia

• Type

Make your selection and then click ‘Add Attribute’, then under values, select the correct match. For example for ‘Art – Condition’ you can select from:

• New
• Excellent Condition
• Fair Condition
• Good Condition
• Needs Restortion

Go through and add all the required attributes.

Click ‘Save Attribute’

Variables

If you need to add product variation, select the ‘Custom attribute’ and then click ‘Add Attribute’, give the attribute a name and then add some options. Please be aware: custom attributes will NOT BE USED for filters.

Click ‘Save Attribute’

After you save it an new option will appear. Then select “Used for Variations”. Click ‘Save Attribute’ again.

A new section will appear below this.

You can either Add Variations manually or let the platform create one variation for each combination. For example, in our example, this would create two variations: a framed and unframed version. But if you have a second Custom attributes, for example, frame colour – gold or silver, then it would create four variations: gold framed, silver framed, gold unframed, and silver unframed. In this instance you would then need to manually remove gold unframed and edit silver unframed to just say unframed – to make sense. Below I’ve autogenerated two variations:

If you toggle open each of these you can setup the costs for each variation.

Each variation can have the following properties:

• Image – Click the placeholder to add an image. For example you can show the painting in a frame and out of a frame.
• SKU – Enter the SKU or leave blank. Note: If you set an SKU at the product level but leave it blank at the variation level, SKU will default to product level SKU. 
• Enabled – Enable or disable the variation.
• Regular Price (required) – Set the price for this variation. Variations without prices don’t show in your store.
• Sale Price (optional) – Set a price for this variation when on sale.
• Downloadable – This can be ignored
• Virtual – This can be ignored
• Manage Stock? –
  • Stock quantity – if selected. Allows to set the current stock level for the variation.
  • “Allow backorders?” – Enables allowing backorders for the variation; if enabled, stock can go below zero.
  • Low stock threshold – When the stock for the variation reaches this level, the system will send you a notification email. If you haven’t configured it, WooCommerce uses the product-wide threshold (see Inventory Management below).
• Tax class – Use tax classes to charge different tax rates for a specific variation. Read more about tax classes
• Variation description – An additional description just for this variation.

Then click ‘Save Variations’

Other Options

Visibility: The visibility option defines the privacy of the product. By default “Visable” is selected. But if you want the product to only appear on the category listing page, search results, or want to list it as a hidden product, then you can select the option respectively.

If you select any other option than Visable then the product will not appear on the site other than the store page.

Purchase Note: If you want the customer to receive a custom message right after purchasing the product, you can paste that in the box.

Reviews: If the vendor does not want to receive reviews for the product from the customers, he can turn it on or off.