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When should you cross-link products
Normally if you wish to connect products, you’ll simply use the connected products options to connect a print product to any of an original, a limited edition, or a polyptych product. However if you’d like to connect a print to another print or a different type of product than the ones listed, you’ll need to manually create links between the different products, usually in the short description of each.
Setting Up Product Names and Smart-URLs
The first thing to look at is setting up the Product Names for each, and the Smart-URLs. The reason for this is to differentiate between the two products, and make sure that the Smart URL for each is unique (in order to prevent the system from adding random characters to the end of the URL to differentiate them).
For this example, I’m going to use a regular print product, and a separate print product set up as a merch product. These will need different product names, so they’ll show up as visibly different products if you search for them on the site, and also different Smart URLs.
The original product’s name will be left unchanged.
And the merch product’s name will have “(Merch)” added to the end of it.
Click on Save after making this change.
The other important change is with the Smart URL of each product. This affects the name of the product page. In this case, the print has already been set up correctly, with a tidy URL entered.
However the merch product was created with the same Smart URL, and when this happens the system will append a series of random numbers and characters to the end to differentiate this from the other product.
What I’ll do here is remove those characters, and replace them with “-merch”. Then I’ll save the page, and I’ll need to return to the Art Print Store and re-open the product from there with its new address.
Creating and adding product links
First we’ll add a link to the merch product in the short description of the print product. For this, we’ll need to open the merch product on the live site. To do this, go to the merch product page in the Site Manager, and click on Preview Site at the bottom of the page.
Once the merch product has loaded, you need to copy part of its address.
You don’t need the entire address to create this link, just the part to the right of <yoursitename>.artstorefronts.com. This will start with the / and include the Art Print Store name, the product type (art_print_product) and the Smart URL that we set up earlier. In this case, it is /merch/art_print_products/fog-030717-merch
Copy this, and we’ll next go to the print product to set up this link.
Open the print product, and scroll down to the Short Description field.
Add the text here that you’re going to be linking to; the phrasing is up to you, and will depend on the type of product, and how you wish to reference it.
Now, highlight the word or words you wish to link, and click on the Link icon on the toolbar above the text window.
This will open the Link property window.
Paste the link from the merch product into the URL field, and click on OK.
You can now click on the Save button on the bottom-right of the window to save this, as this link is now complete.
The next step is to do the same process, copying the address of the print product, and adding it to the short description of the merch product.
Open the product page for the print product, and copy the address to the right of the artstorefronts.com section.
This will include the name of the Art Print Store, the Product Type, and then the Smart URL of the product. In this case it will be /art/art_print_products/fog-030717
Now open the merch product page, and in the Short Description field enter the line of text you wish to use to reference the print product, highlight the text you’re going to use for your link, and click on the Link button.
When the Link dialogue window opens, paste the address of the print product into the URL field, and click on OK.
You can now click on the Save button to record your changes, and the links are now complete.
On the print product, there is a link to the merch product. Clicking on this will load up the page for the merch product.
And on the merch product, there is a link which takes the customer to the print product.
