Introduction to Products

What are Products?

A Product is any item that you sell directly to a customer. In Craftybase, we group together all your variations, expenses, orders and manufactures for each of the products that you sell. In this way, you can see at a glance the amount you have sold, manufactured and currently have in stock.

Products can either be individually manually created, imported in bulk via spreadsheet or imported via one of our available sales channel integrations.

Importing from Sales Channels

Craftybase offers the ability to connect and download your products from a number of sales channels including Etsy, Shopify, Square and PayPal. If you don't use these channels or have other products you wish to enter that are not available on your channels, then you'll want to work through this tutorial where we will be creating the products manually.

As part of the welcome setup process, you would have been given the opportunity to connect your sales channels. If you skipped this step, you can connect your sales channels at any time on your account settings pages. Once you have added your Sales Channel, you can then request a manual import of data from a date of your choosing. This will create products on your behalf for all matching products found in the sales channel.

Your imported product names will be set directly from the title of your imported product. You can change your product name to better represent the product if you wish - this will not affect any linkage between your external product and craftybase.

Adding Products Manually

To add a product manually, you'll want to go to your Add Product page.

1. Click on the Products tab to get to your Products List:

2. From here, click on the Add Product button that appears in the top right hand corner of the page.

3. Now you should be on the Add Product page.

Let's take a closer look at the fields and options located on this form:

3a. The first field on the form is for the Name of your product. This is the title of the product that you'd like to use for your inventory tracking purposes.

3b. Next is your SKU field. If you use stock keeping codes to identify your products, this is where they should go. Codes are fully searchable in the system, so they can be a quick way of finding your products without needing to type the full name.

3c. The next field, Image allows you to upload an image that represents the product. This is optional, but it can be a good way of quickly identifying your product in your lists. It is also displayed on your invoice view, so if you intend to use this feature then you may wish to consider uploading images.

Sales Information

4. The next section is for defining sales related information about your product.

4a. The first field in this set is your Auto Manufacture configuration. If you'd like a manufacture to be created automatically each time an order is imported / added to Craftybase, then you'll want to tick this box. (More information about Auto Manufactures can be found here: How does the Auto Manufacture feature work?)

4b. The Low stock limit textbox allows you to define the minimum quantity of this product that should be in stock before it is marked with a stock status of "low stock". You don't need to use this feature if this isn't important to you, but it can be a good tool for being aware of stock you are running low on before you run out completely.

4c. The last field in this section is your Regular Sale Price. This is mainly for setting the default price for any manual orders that you create for this product, but can be useful when viewing your Pricing Guidance as it will show you your current profit and markup for this price.

Starting Adjustment

5. If you are moving from another inventory system, you can "bring forward" your unit price and stock level and then work forward from the date you moved across. Alternatively, to backdate everything since you started your business leave all fields in this section as zero and then add your past orders and manufactures to bring your stock up to current levels.

5a. The Starting Quantity textbox will be recorded as a Starting Adjustment for the product and will be set as your current stock on hand for this Product. Any Manufactures or Orders you add after this point will increase and decrease this number accordingly. The Material Unit Cost field is for setting the material value of any stock you are bringing into the system without accounting for them via orders or manufactures. Do not include internal labor costs or overheads here.

Additional Details

6. This section of the form is hidden away by default to speed up data entry in cases where you may not wish to add these details right now. To open the section, click anywhere on the heading and fields will appear below it.

6a. Category is for your use to segment or classify your product. It is optional and you can set this later via the edit product form if you wish. You can either select from your list of existing categories, or alternatively add a new category by simply typing it in the textbox.

6b. The next field is Description and is a field you can use to note anything about the product that you wish. These notes are not displayed on invoices, so this is field for your use only.

6c. The State selection box has three available options: Active, Draft and Archived. Active is the default setting for product and is the one you should choose if you wish to add this product to your product list. If this is a product you aren't ready to sell quite yet you can set this as "Draft" to seperate it from the rest of your products. This can be a good option to use when working on new prototype products. "Archived" is for products that you have previously sold and no longer make - marking a product as Archived removes it from most views and searches around Craftybase, although it can still be found via a filter search on your products page.

6d. The Measurement Type field is for determining the unit of measurement you wish to use for this product. For many products you may just wish to leave this as the default item but for others you may wish to be more descriptive (e.g. jar, bar, scarf, bracelet, roll, basket).

6e. Your Sale Quantity field is for defining how many items Craftybase should decrease your inventory by each time you register a new sale of this product.

Once happy with the information you have added on the product form, click the Save Product button to submit the details. Once saved, you'll be taken to your product page.

Have some questions?

If you have any additional questions, please get in touch and we'll be happy to give you a hand. Alternatively, feel free to join and post your question in our official Craftybase Facebook group.