What are Products and Offers?
In FreshStore, we have separate Products and Offers.
This might be confusing at first, but it allows us to have powerful features like price comparison and country localisation.
Check out this video for a full explanation:
What is a product?
A product is the actual product itself (e.g. a Motorbike Helmet). It has content like descriptions, titles, images and it has a page in your store.
The product in FreshStore does not have a price, affiliate link or shipping details. Instead, it has one or more offers.
What is an offer?
An offer is attached to a product. It has a price, shipping details, and a link to buy from a merchant (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, AliExpress).
A product can have many offers, and they can be added/removed from the product at any time.
Why are Offers and Products separate?
A big reason is so the product is permanently in our store. If the offers change, the product link stays the same, e.g.:
https://playstation.goshopgaming.com/products/playstation-5-console
If Amazon stops selling PS5 consoles then we can simply attach an offer from Walmart or eBay and keep the link the same.
We often share these product pages on social media or link to them from other websites. Keeping the same product means that these links are never broken and we don’t lose traffic.
There are many other benefits to having products and offers setup this way.
What are the benefits of this?
Here are some of the benefits of having Products and Offers separate:
- We can show multiple offers and compare prices
- Some customers have a preference (e.g. they refuse to buy from Amazon)
- The store owner can decide to sell the product directly in the future, and keep the same product page link
- We never lose the content we created for that product
- Our search engine rankings for that product page are not affected if an offer changes
Auto-Matching Offers
FreshStore will automatically try to find more offers for your products. It will use the unique product barcode (also called EAN, UPC or IBAN) to find the offers.
For more information please see this Guide to Exact Match Offers.