Showcasing your products with the Products module

Showcasing your products to the optimum is vital for the expansion of your online business. You can rely on the diverse Products module to select which product lines or niches to show on different pages on your website. The process is pretty similar to the utilization of the Posts List module for showcasing separate blog posts.

Again, for the purpose of the current tutorial, a New Page with Clean layout will be created and we will work in Live Edit view. The Products module is accessible from the Modules bar. Navigate to it by clicking on the three horizontal lines at the top of the screen. Locate the Products module and simply drag and drop it onto your website. Then click on the small wheel in the top left corner, accompanied by the name of the module. This will prompt up a new window containing the available settings for it.

The module has three customizable sections: Manage, Settings and Skin/Template.

Manage offers a view of the currently shown products. By default the Products module shows all products that are existing on your website (or online shop). These products are sorted by the date and time they were added, in ascending order. You can rearrange any of the products using the slider on the left side, dragging and dropping to the desired location.

The main customizable part is the Settings section. It is the core to showing your content smart and selectively. The dropdown menu lets you choose which available products from which existing website pages will be shown on your website. You can choose to showcase products from separate pages or to exhibit all available products on your website.

An example: In the case of this tutorial we have two different types (dresses and tables) of products from two different Online Shop pages (Dresses and Furniture).  By alternating between different pages in the Settings section you can set whether to showcase only the dresses from the Dresses page, the tables from the Furniture page or both.

There are additional customizable fields like Thumbnail, Title, Description, a Read More Link, Date and a Hide Paging option. You can also input how many products per page you’d like to show visitors. These fields are editable – for example you can rename your Read More Link into "Learn more" or whatever your preferences are. You can also define the arrangement of your content – ascending or descending, and according to the Title, Date or Position.

The Skin/Template section offers additional customizability in terms of cosmetic looks. There are a number of different skins and templates (Sidebar, Masonry, Default and others). All of them are suitable for different preferences and purposes – Masonry includes bigger pictures for previewing products, Sidebar is more on the minimalistic side. Be sure to play around and check all the options available to aid your e-commerce enthusiasm.