Pearl has superb product management tools, for more information see the Products user guide. What follows below is only a quick summary.

Demo: create a new product. Click Products->Create new from the main menu.

Enter a name. Type ! in the name, and you’ll see that you're not allowed. Pearl has a large number of error checking procedures in place to prevent you entering bad data.

Choose a brand, choose the category you created earlier (one that does not have any further subcategories), set manage stock to "yes", set a cost price (what you pay for the item), set a retail price (ex vat) and enter a description under the "English" tab. Leave the bundle information for later - that's for grouping items together and creating discounts. Save the product, and you'll be taken to the product listing page.

To find your new product, enter part of the name into the product quick search box. You'll see a link "create options". Click this, and enter "2" into the box. This will give us a total of three options for this product, to which we can assign colours, sizes and so on.

Set your three [size] options, and click save.

To edit the options and values available to use for products, click Products->Options or Products->Option values from the main menu.

Search for your product again using the quick search box - you'll see that there are now three variations. Each has it's own stock level, own image and prices, but shares the same name and description - Pearl calls these items "sister products".

Now add an image to the product. Click the grey image icon at the right hand side of the screen for the product you want to add an image to. Browse your local computer for an image (JPEG or GIF is best) and click "upload". Pearl will resize the image to create thumbnails for you, according to the size set in Setup->Website (leave these options as they are for the moment).

Make sure the options are all set to show on the website (click the green tick icon ), then view the public end of the website at http://demo.thisispearl.com to see your product.

Bundles

You can bundle products together to create deals, or assemblies. Create a new product, and under the 'bundle' tab add a couple of sub-products to this bundle. The cost of the bundle can be less than the sum of the components, and can be used for deals such as 'buy 2 get one free' [add 3 of the same item to the bundle]. The stock of each sub-product will get updated when an order containing the bundle is posted to accounts. Bundles can be nested to a level of 2 (i.e. one bundle within a bundle)

Bundles can also be set with options, for example the bundle 'Padset':

Padset (Small): contains 1 knee pads (Small) and 1 elbow pads (Small)

Padset (Medium): contains 1 knee pads (Medium) and 1 elbow pads (Medium)

Padset (Large): contains 1 knee pads (Large) and 1 elbow pads (Large)

Product requests and stock control

Products that have no stock available and are set to 'no allow checkout' cannot be bought online. If you set a product to 'yes' allow checkout, it can still be bought when you have no stock available. Having no stock available may mean that you have none in stock at all, or all your current stock is allocated on other orders.

If the customer cannot buy the product, they are given the option to add themselves to a request list. When the product is later received on a Purchase Order, the customer will get an automatic email and/or text message from your system saying that the item is back in stock. To see the current request list click Contacts->Requests. (There may not be any, it depends on the current status of the demo system)
 

Downloadable Products

You can upload a file to a product if you want the user to pay to download the file. It will be available for a number of hours once the sale has been posted to accounts. To set this time value, go to Setup->Website. When a sale containing a downloadable product has been posted to accounts, the customer will receive an email notifying them that the download is available. This extra step is required to allow you to verify that the payment made is valid before allowing download of the file.

Demo: create a downloadable product that we will then purchase on the public demo website.

1. Create a new product as outlined above
2. In the Product Info tab, you have the choice to upload a file.
3. Upload a small file, enter all the other product information and save the file. Make sure that the product is web enabled.

Visit the demo website (http://demo.thisispearl.com) and find your product using the search box or by navigating the menus.

1. Add the product to your shopping cart Click 'Checkout'
2. Log in using username demo@thisispearl.com and password demo_user, or create a new account if you want to see the registration process in action.
3. Choose a shipping method, then a payment method (if you choose cheque/bank transfer you will not be prompted to enter any personal financial information)
4. View the confirmation details, and then confirm the order. Click the 'My account' link
5. Click 'Downloads' to see the downloads available to you.

You'll see that there is a file on an order, but since the order has not yet been posted to accounts, the file is not available for download.

Go back to the admin area, click Sales and open the order that you have just created by clicking the edit (pencil) icon. Set the status to 'Closed:other' in the status history tab and save the order. Now click 'Post to accounts' to post the order to the accounting database and email the customer to let them know the download is available.

Visit the download page on the demo website and see that you can now download the file.   
 

Creating products by spreadsheet

When you need to create a large number of products at once, you can import a tab de-limited spreadsheet of products. Click Products->Import/Export to see the column format required. Pearl requires that the options and option values match exactly those already existing on the system.

Manually updating the stock of products

If for some reason the quantity of items in stock in Pearl is wrong (perhaps you have lost an item) you can export a list of products, amend the stock quantity, and re-import the file.

Note that you should not amend the stock levels this way if you have given stock away as a prize, gift etc. Create a sales order and set the value to be zero. Then your Profit and Loss account will show that you purchased the stock, it has an asset value and have now written it off properly.

Intangible products

It is quite likely that you will want to create sales invoices for customers for items such as time, labour or services. These should be created on Pearl as a regular product, but make sure that "manage stock" is set to "no".

The Pearl Advanced Product Management tool is a way to edit the properties of multiple products at once, and a way to create Purchase Orders dependent on current stock levels. You can also manual update stock levels using the stock wizard: Products-> Stock adjustment

Advanced product management (APM)

Go to Products-> APM. A list of products can be shown, browsing by supplier, brand or searching name/SKU.

With the displayed products you can create a Purchase Order, add a supplier to the list of suppliers for the product (products can have multiple suppliers), update the alert level (the minimum level of stock you like to keep) and so on.

You can see which of the products is already on a Purchase Order, and when that PO is due to arrive.