How To Set Up The Products for the Gift Shop
If some of your art pieces can be purchased on different merch products like tote bags, throw pillows, mugs, and others, you might want to consider creating a Gift Shop gallery on your website. It's important for your website visitors to be able to see that they can purchase these Gifts without even needing to browse through other themed product galleries (such as Abstract, Landscapes, Watercolor,...)
However, before we set up the Gift Shop galleries on your live website, you will first want to make sure your products are set up in an optimal way.
Ideally, every art piece that you are offering in a variety of different print mediums (canvas, metal, tote bags, mugs,...) would be set up as one art print product in the back end of your website. To set up the products in an optimal way for the Gift Shop, follow the steps in How To Set Up The Products for the Gift Shop.
How To Set Up the Gift Shop Product Galleries
Now that we have set up the products for the Gift Shop galleries, it is time to set up the product galleries.
1. Go to the Pages tab, and click + Add Page button
2. Name this new page 'Gift Shop', and for the type select Product Gallery then click Create
3. Next, select Other Product Galleries type and click Create.
4. Now, let's add another product gallery in which we are going to display Mugs. Again, go to the Pages tab, and click + Add Page button
5. Name this new page 'My Tote Bags', and for the type select Product Gallery then click Create
6. Next, select Specific Products type and click Create.
7. Now repeat step 6 for all product types you want to display in your Gift Shop. In our case, we are going to create 5 more product galleries: My T-shirts, My Throw Pillows, My Phone Cases, My Mugs, My Wall Calendars.
8. Now let's nest all the 6 galleries under the gallery Gift Shop, by simply dragging and dropping them under the Gift Shop:
9. Now lets click on the Gift Shop gallery, and in the Info tab, under Display These Product Gallery Pages As Categories:, checkmark all the product galleries we have created in steps 4-7. Click Save
10. Next, we want to add the products that we have prepared to display in the product galleries. There are multiple ways that you can do this, by going to individual product galleries, and adding the selected products there, by moving the products (in bulk) to galleries from the store, or even directly from the product. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will show you how to do this directly from the product.
11. While on the product page, withing the PRODUCT INFO section, click on the edit link next to Product Galleries
12. Checkmark all the product galleries we have created in steps 4-7 and click Update
13. Repeat this process for all the products you want to display in your Gift Shop
14. Now, lets see how this looks like on the live website. Click View Live Site
15. On the live website, we can now see all our product galleries in the Gift Shop, but none of the galleries display the actual merch products that they represent.
16. There is one last thing that we need to do for each of the product galleries to be able to showcase our beautiful merchandise. Let's start with the first one, My Tshirts.
17. Open My Tshirts product gallery, go to Info tab and then scroll down to the Gallerywide Default Medium setting
Selecting a default medium in this drop-down will make this medium the default selected medium for all products across this product gallery, when opening the product's buying page from this product gallery.
18. Logically, within the gallery My Tshirts, we are going to select T-Shirts as the default medium and then click the blue Save button at the bottom right corner
19. Let's now repeat steps 16-18 for other product galleries: My Tote Bags, My Throw Pillows, My Phone Cases, My Mugs, My Wall Calendars
20. Lets take a look at the live site now. We'll see that all the merch products are showing correct product previews in the Gift Shop:
21. Now we will take a look at one of the product galleries, for example Tote Bags. You will notice that all the products are displayed as Tote Bags, without the website visitor even needing to filter the Tote Bags medium on the left hand-side filter
22. Lastly, let's click on the product Tit Bird from withing My Tote Bags gallery. One the product page opens, the default product preview is the tote bag, and the default medium selected is Tote Bags
If a potential buyer was to land on this page, and if they are ready to purchase a $23.80 Tote Bag, they can easily do that with one click to instantly checkout. But if they're not committed to purchasing a tote bag, they might still be interested in a small canvas print, or a $10 Mug. No need for them to leave the page!
23. The same will happen if you open the product from another product gallery, for example T-shirts. Though we are still technically looking at the same product, this time, when opened from the Tshirts gallery, the default product preview will show a Tshirt, and the default selected medium will be a Tshirt.
By setting up your Gift Shop this way, you have managed to do the following:
Provide a great user experience to your website visitors, quickly showing them a variety of gift products that you offer, and not leading then in a dead-end product page where they can only purchase one medium. Instead you are again showing them a variety, and increasing not only your chances of making a sale, but also increasing the order value (for someone that really likes a specific piece, they might buy a large canvas and a TShirt too!)
You have made it easy for yourself to create the products and maintain your website.