Categories
Categories help to arrange your wines on the main product page into sections, which allows easier management. You can build and base the categories on any parameter you choose for your winery or retail program.

Winery examples we have seen:

Current Vintage—Recent Vintages—Library Wines
This is the most common, so that you can manage your available inventory, turn the categories on and off quickly with an open cart sales module, and continually shift your remaining inventory down the list as the current vintage gets released.

Variety breakdown
Less effective for wineries because if you have many different varieties for sale, it will spread out your products page both on the admin side and in the open cart module, with additional spaces between categories.

Vintage breakdown
If you release white wine vintages sooner than red wine vintages, this will create lots of additional unneeded space on the website display pages and cause more cumbersome searching as an admin user.

Retailer examples we have seen:

Regional breakdown
The most common is to utilize regional associations as your Categories. That way if a customer is searching online for Red Burgundy, White Burgundy, California, Oregon, Washington, Loire, Champagne, Piedmont, New Zealand...and you have a categories for all, it will provide a more effective shopping experience. 

​Archive Feature
As wines start to sell out, older vintages with no stock will begin to pile up in your main Products page (as an admin user). Do not delete these past Products so as not to affect your ability to research past orders. The course of action is to Archive these sold out products.

-Click the check box to the left of a product name. At the top of that product Category list you will see a drop down menu called ‘Choose an action’. Click that drop down and select Archive.

-This process will move the product from your main page of active/inactive wines, over to the Archive page. You can still access these Archived products which allows you to duplicate the SKU, research past orders, etc.

-Doing this will keep your main products page organized for your staff and it will decrease the amount of options on the “Select Products” page of the order process.

**Very Important**—For retailers, take this advice to heart now and start the process of archiving your sold out vintages. Even if you archive a wine you can still bring it back to the main Products page later on. However, if a couple months or years go by, and you don’t archive any wines, the Products page will become far too overstocked to manage. Plus, if you have a speed challenged internet/wifi connection, loading thousands of items on the main products page will become noticeable.

​**Very Important again**—URL links connected to inactive or archived products
If a product has been offered for sale at some point on your website and you used a direct hyperlink in an email campaign for clients to click and access that product, when it was Active...that link is still out there, either in an email in a customer's inbox, as part of a pdf, available/presented on a social media post, etc. So even if that product is inactive on your website, the link/url does still exist in the world of the internet.

Beyond your presentation of that product via a hyperlink URL, there might even be a situation where Google has picked up that product in search results or a friend copy and pasted the URL and emailed it to a friend or posted it on social media. All this can happen without your input.

Therefore, you have to be careful here because if there is inventory still present in that SKU, and it is marked as Inactive or even Archived in your Figure app, that link will still connect if clicked on by a customer and they will be able to place an order!

There are two things you would need to do in order to keep "Inactive" and even "Archived" products from being sold, to fully shut down that SKU:

-Remove all remaining stock from that SKU. That is the number one way to keep customers from placing orders via accessing the product from past hyperlinks or Google search results.

-Change the Product Availability. If you need to keep inventory numbers intact, the other option is inside the product details page, under "Product Availability" you should mark it as "Not For Sale".