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From Elxis Official Documentation

Product types is a way to organize your products independently from the product categories. Products types can be Books, Software, DVD movies, etc. By assigning a product type to a product the product automatically gets all the special characteristics (extra fields) other products with the same product type have. This increases productivity when working with IOS Eshop.

An other cool feature of product types is that you can select the Manufacturer Title for each product type. For example a book can not have a manufacturer. A book should have an author. A painting should have an Artist, etc. IOS Eshop has 8 different Manufacturer Titles but you can change their names if they do not match your exact needs by modifying their names on the language files. The manufacturer titles are:

• Author
• Publisher
• Artist
• Company
• Developer
• Creator
• Producer
• Manufacturer (default)

To better understand how product types, extra fields and manufacturers co-work lets see an example.

Product types example

I want to create a shopping cart to sell 2 kind of products, DVD Movies and paper books. I will create 2 product types, DVD Movies and Books (you can give any names you like).

For product type DVD Movies I will add extra fields that describe a product such as DVD:

• Cast (actors)
• Year
• Duration
• Subtitles
• Audio

For product type Books I will add extra fields such as:

• Number of pages
• Year of publication
• Hard cover

Each time I go to add a new DVD movie, independently from its category, the extra fields that describe books will be loaded automatically. The same for Books. As for the Manufacturer Title on the DVDs product product page it will display him as Producer and on books product pages as Author.

Additional info (extra fields) for a product type. Check boxes indicates that an extra field is being displayed in the advanced search form.

Add/Edit additional info

To add an extra field for a product type click Add. Write the field title in 1, 2, 3 or 4 languages (depending on your multi-language settings on IOS Eshop configuration) and click the disk icon to save it. To remove an extra field click on the delete icon next to it. The Add/Edit/Save/Delete features uses AJAX and you don't have to save the whole product type in order to save the extra fields. While you click on the save/delete icons your action has been processed.

The screen shot bellow shows how your extra fields will look like on your product edit page.

Filling-in additional info for a product.