How to Leverage Product Characteristics and Variants for a great Assisted Sale

A product characteristic is defined as a feature that is primarily physical and generally measurable such as color, size, shape, taste, texture, etc. It is used to create variants of base products. Let’s explain these terms with an example.

Let’s say we need to create T-shirts in three sizes (S, M and L) and two colors (blue and red). Here the generic product has two characteristics (size and color) and we can “explode” them to create the different variants:

• T-shirt size S, color blue
• T-shirt size S, color red
• T-shirt size M, color blue
• …
• T-shirt size L, color red

This basic definition can be extended in the sense that when retailers create or distribute a product, they have specific product features in mind. This is to help differentiate its products and its business and as a consequence, to help determine the correct price of each variant of a product and, last but not least, to meet customer needs, for example during the shopping experience. This is because we can use these characteristics to create sophisticated product searches to match customer preferences during the customer decision journey.

Providing a personalized customer service is crucial today to save-the-sale in the store, therefore store associates need to be empowered with tools that help them serve customers. For example, imagine  you are a store associate attending to a customer that has a vague idea of what he wants to buy, he knows the brand, the use he wants to give to the product, the material, the price range, etc. These features are modeled by product characteristics at Openbravo and used as search filters in the Web POS.

To learn how to configure Product Characteristics to get the maximum potential of this functionality keep reading…

Can you imagine the number of product characteristics and therefore product variants a company might need to manage to meet different customer needs? From just physical and generally measurable ones to much more complex ones such as technological, design or market ones depending on the type of business.

Openbravo makes it possible to define different types of product characteristics in a single window. Product characteristics that can automatically create “variants” from a “generic” product by exploding or not a given set of product characteristics.

Let us imagine that the characteristic “Color” has so many values that it is not worth exploding it while creating “variants” of a “generic” product, while “Size” can be exploded as for any new product created and all sizes are likely to be sold.

Besides that, a product characteristic marked “Variant=No” does not create variants of a product but indicates that the “generic” product and all its “variants” belong to a specific “Fashion Style” such as “Sport” for instance.

Once a product has been defined as a “Generic” product and applicable product characteristics have been defined for it as shown in the image below:

it is possible to manually select the colors in the “Characteristics Configuration” tab, for instance “Blue”, “Red” and “Black”, and after that press the “Manage Variants” button to select all or just a set of product variants to be created which afterwards can be handled as products.

Join us next week on a webinar dedicated to Apparel & Footwear Retailing, where we will discuss about the challenges these retailers are facing right now.

Thursday 5th of May at 11.30 CET in English

Thursday 5th of May at 17.00 CET in Spanish