PRODUCT FEATURES

Features are characteristics used to sell and to differentiate products. The Open for Business catalog manager allows you to define any feature set you wish for your products. Typical features include size and color. In Open for Business, features are associated, or applied, to products as Standard Features, Selectable Features, or Distinguishing Features.

Standard features
Standard features are features which are associated with every instance of a product. An example might be the brand name of a product — all instances of the product share the same brand name.

Selectable features
Selectable features are features which the customer selects one from many available choices. For example, a shirt may be available in White, Blue, Green, Yellow, Pink. These colors would be selectable features of the variant product shirt, and the customer would be prompted to choose a color.
Each color, though, would be a standard feature of the physical product. Thus, White would be a selectable feature of the virtual product ‘shirt’ but a standard feature of ‘white shirt.’

Distinguishing features
Distinguishing features are features which distinguish one product from another and are used to show the customer which item she chose.

Note the sub-tabs for Feature Categories and Feature Groups. These are both used to help you organize your product features. Each feature can only belong to one category but as many groups as you need. For example, you can have a colors category that has colors White, Blue, Grey, Green, Yellow, Pink, Red, and Orange and a sizes category that has sizes XXS, XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL. Then, you can have one group for shirts that would have colors White, Blue, Grey and sizes S, M, L, XL, XXL, and another group for dresses that have colors Yellow, Pink, Red, Orange and sizes XXS, XS, S, M, and L.

Implementing Feature-based Product Search

You can associate feature categories or feature groups to a Product Category. Buy doing this will provide web store customer feature based product search ability. If customers choose to search within a given category and that category has features associated with it then they will be displayed as selectable filtering options (based on the associated product features) on the search form.