Before you create products : setting up
Whilst creating a new product, you must input the brand name; therefore a good place to start is to set up the brand names of your products. Go to Products - Setup - Brands to enter this data. As some products may not be branded, it is recommended that you also add a brand name as “other”.
To organise your products you will need to place them into categories and sub-categories, go to Products - Categories to edit default categories and add subcategories if required. If you have a Brightpearl website, these will also be the categories in which customers search/browse for your products online.
Adding products using the online interface
You are now ready to create products or import a product list from a spreadsheet.To manually input products, click Products - Create new from the main menu. Enter a name. Type “!” in the name, and you'll see that you’re not allowed. Brightpearl has a large number of error checking procedures in place to prevent you entering bad data.
Choose a brand, choose a category (one that does not have any further subcategories), set a cost price (what you pay for the item), set a retail price (ex vat) and enter a description under the "English" tab. Save the product, and you'll be taken to the product listing page. To edit the item, click the pencil icon.
To make the product appear on your website, it will need to have a retail price set for the region that the website is being viewed in, and also it will need to be “web enabled”. You can sell any item using the admin or EPOS screens regardless of its web enabled setting.
Product suppliers
Adding a supplier to a product will allow you to create automatic purchase orders when stock runs low. You should also enter an alert level, a stock quantity below which Brightpearl will flag an item for re-order.
Finding products
To find a product, enter part of the name into the product quick search box and click “go”. Alternatively you can click Products - Categories, browse to the category and click the number in the products column to see all products in a certain category.
Delete a product
- Find the product: Type the name, or a part of the name, into the product quick search box and click
- Click the trash can icon for the product you want to delete.
- The page will reload. Confirm that you really do want to delete the item.
- You cannot delete products if stock exists.
Product tax codes
Each item must be allocated a Tax Code so that Brightpearl can automatically create a VAT return. When creating or editing a product, select the Tax Code under the [Product prices] tab.
Adding images to products
1. Prepare your images
In your image editing software (eg: photoshop) make sure that you resize your images to no larger than 600x600 pixels - This is the maximum size that Brightpearl displays.
Brightpearl will resize images any larger than this, you will retain more control if you provide a smaller size.
Try and use the bicubic resampling method to acheive the crispest resized images.
File Type: Try to use JPEGs for pictorial images and GIFs for graphical images - the compression that each format uses is more suited toeach image type.
Resolution : 72dpi
mode: for JPEG/JPG - do NOT use progressive jpegs - use standard instead.
target file size: you should aim for lower than 60Kb - adjust the compression when saving you images to acheive this.
2. Uploading images
Open the product for editing, and click the "upload image" icon in the images tab.Browse your computer for an image and click "upload". Brightpearl will resize the image to create thumbnails for you, according to the size set in Setup - Other - Website.
Product Category Images / Icons
Product category icons can be uploaded from the Website - Categories page. Select a category, click the edit icon and then upload an image to be used as the thumbnail / icon for the whole category.
If you do not add a category icon, Brightpearl will check one level deeper for any products with images and randomly assign a product image as the category icon.
Please be aware that if there are no products within one level of the category tree then no icon will be displayed if you don't add an icon yourself.
Product prices
To edit the price for a product, open the product edit page and click the Prices tab. You will need to have set up your price lists first, if you wish to have more than a basic buy and sell price.
All product prices are stored as net value (ie without tax) to 4 decimal places, and tax is added depending on the customer's country and the product tax code that is set.
If a price list does not have a price, then the item will not appear on the website when viewed from that country, even if it is set as "web enabled".
See the separate help topic on price lists for more information.
Barcodes
See the Retail / POS help for information on bar codes.
Tips for products
Make your product name identify the product even when it is not shown with the brand next to it. Don't forget that the product name must be unique for each product. So for example, if your store contains tee shirts from Nike and Adidas, you cannot call them both "Tee shirt". We recommend adding the brand to the start of the name, eg "Nike tee shirt". This also makes it easier to find the product in lists and reduces potential for error.
By careful about using Microsoft Word to edit product descriptions as it tends to add lots of junk html code to the description that will corrupt your product display.
