"Related Products" Additional Text

[joshpappas]

I'd like a way to add extra text to our "related products" listings to provide some staff insights on why we choose certain items as related. We sell fireworks, so it's not always obvious why we recommend one item as related to another and we think we could increase the value of those recommendations with a little more information.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Why not just use a custom product field? If the note is to explain the collection of Related Products, use a field populated by the main product. If its for each related product, populate the info in the related product.

[joshpappas]

That's possible but it's cumbersome. The note would be specific to each related product (the reason A is related to B is different from why A is related to C), so the custom field on the main product would have to hold delimited data about each related product that gets parsed through when displaying them on the product page. I did something similar as a workaround to list captions with product images once (another "dream feature" of mine). It's not the most user-friendly option when it's handed off to other people to manage the content.

In my dream scenario, there'd be a way to make those notes on the related products tab. See a list of all the assigned products and make a quick note for each one. Then that's available in the product data when displaying those products in the template. Easy peasy.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Maintenance and system creation would be a challange, but it does seem like this is more or less based at the "Product" level, not the Related Product Level.

So, Lets say Product AAA, has BBB, CCC, DDD related products. In the Product AAA's custom field, you have:

BBB is recommended because of XYZ
CCC is recommended because of ABC
DDD is recommended because of JKI

If you formatted those like this

BBB is recommended because of XYZ|CCC is recommended because of ABC|DDD is recommended because of JKI

You could display that note NEXT to the related products themselves using a count and "gettoken(l.settings:thatCustomField, '|', g.theCount)"

Yea, not pretty, but I don't see an easier way.

[joshpappas]

Yep that's what I had in mind and the only way I know to do it today. Not worth the effort currently but that's why I put it here to hopefully get Miva's devs to do it for me and make it easy to implement :)

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I'm not sure anything could be done to make it easier...and using custom fields would mean this could be done via CSV import. you might, if you don't know about this, look into custom field Groups. Groups let you organize custom fields that are related to each other and create a new Product screen tab you can reposition so at least you can position it in a more handy location on the Product Screen.