# Adding products

Products are at the core of Flow Retail. While some retailers manage a few hundred products, others work with tens of thousands.

To get the most out of the platform, it’s essential to invest time in adding accurate and detailed product information. This not only improves daily operations, but also enhances reporting, inventory control, and customer experience — all alongside the most important task: selling.

## Adding New Products

To sell products using Flow Retail, you must first add them to the system.

Here, we discuss different methods to accomplish this:

### Methods to Add Products:

1. **Manually in Flow Backoffice:**
   * Ensure your user has Backoffice access with at least Department Manager permissions.
   * Log in to [backoffice.flowretail.com](http://backoffice.flowretail.com).
   * Navigate to **Products > Products > New Product**.
   * Fill in all the required fields and click **Save** or **Save and Create New**.
   * This document focuses on this manual method of product addition.
2. **Integrating an External System**:
   * Integration with an ERP or PIM system that contains the necessary product data.
3. **Importing from a Spreadsheet**:
   * Use an XLSX file to import product data directly into the system.
4. **Cloning Existing Products**:
   * Utilize the Clone Product function to create similar product entries quickly.

Choose the method that best suits your needs to efficiently manage and sell products through Flow Retail.

### Recommendations for which method to use

| Number of products to add | Recommended method |
| ------------------------- | ------------------ |
| Under 100                 | Manual or Cloning  |
| 100 - 10.000              | Spreadsheet import |
| More than 10.000          | API integration    |

{% hint style="success" %}
You can use the Clone function to clone most details from an existing product.
{% endhint %}

## General product fields

<table data-full-width="true"><thead><tr><th>Field</th><th width="719.08203125">Description</th><th>Required</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Product Type</td><td>Select 'Stock' for items to track inventory. Choose 'No Stock' for services, fees, or subscriptions. Use 'Configurable' for parent products with variants.</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>SKU</td><td><ul><li>Use a unique SKU or product code.</li><li>Consider using a random 6-7 digit SKU if not using the supplier's SKU</li></ul></td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Name</td><td>Short name / title of the product</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Product Group</td><td>Select one relevant product group. The product group is used for reporting and more</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Brand</td><td>Select one brand. The brand is used for reporting and more</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Serial number controlled</td><td>Choose whether the product shall be controlled by unique serial numbers, either both during Receivement and Sale (validation), or just via Sale (no validation)</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Recommended retail price</td><td>The default price you are selling the product for. If you have price lists or campaigns, they will be prioritized over the RRP</td><td>Yes</td></tr><tr><td>Agreed purchase price</td><td>The default purchase price, if no specific purchase price has been set on the supplier for this specific product</td><td>No</td></tr><tr><td>Calculation factor</td><td>Used for various things, like setting the cost price if no purchase price has been set. Use 1.25 if the VAT is 25% and you have a zero-margin on a product</td><td>Yes</td></tr></tbody></table>

### Choosing the right SKU

{% hint style="warning" %}

### Choosing the right SKU for your products

We recommend using SKUs consisting only of numbers and uppercase letters A-Z. Avoid special characters like underscores, dashes, or slashes.
{% endhint %}

### EAN

Flow Retail supports an unlimited number of EAN/GTIN/barcodes to a product.

Simply add the EAN/GTIN(s) you want to be able to be scanned in any product lookup field in the clients.

{% hint style="success" %}
EAN stands for European Article Number, and is a 13 digit unique number assigned to most products sold in Europe. EAN is over the time being replaced with GTIN, which stands for Global Trade Identification Number.

GTIN-13 is basically EAN-13, with GTIN-12 (UPC) being used for most US products.
{% endhint %}

## Description

There are four available description fields on a product.

### Short Description and Description

In Flow Retail, the distinction between Short Description and Description fields facilitates integration with external systems, like e-commerce platforms.

These systems typically support both short and long/full descriptions, enabling seamless interaction, particularly between a PIM system and an e-commerce platform.

Both fields are visible to users, although typically, only one field is utilized in practice.

### Internal info

When adding a product to a sale, users will receive a notification if there are specific details in the internal info description field.

This feature is useful for reminding users to inform customers about important precautions or to remember internal sales information related to the product.

### External info

Same as internal info, expect that the information in this field will be displayed to the customer, on the receipt or offer.

## Advanced section

The Advanced section consists of very specific features that can be added to any product.

### Product limitations

#### Can be sold

Option to disable the possibility of selling a product, either indefinitely or from a set date.

#### Set expired date

Option to set a date from when the product was expired. This option wont limit either selling or purchasing the product, so it is just an information to the user.

#### Refund not allowed

Option to disable the product from being allowed to be refunded. A typical use case is for expired products that are sold at high discount, and where the customer has been informed that they cannot return it. Or for custom made products, which normally are not obligated to be returned.

#### Price change not allowed

Option to block the user from being able to adjust the price during a sale.

#### Purchase not allowed

Option to block from purchasing the product.

#### Delivery

Option to disable the product from being delivered out, either indefinitely or from a set date. A typical use case would be a new product that is not allowed by the manufacturer to be delivered to the customer before a certain date, due to a launch campaign.

### Other

#### Commission

Option to set a commission in percentage. Used in for example the Arts functionality in Flow Retail, for payouts to a supplier based upon the number of sales.

#### Visibility

Option to hide visibility, e.g. when searching for products, a product with visibility **Not visible** will not be shown.

When entering the exact SKU, products with **Not visible** set will still be opened.

#### Limit to specific stores

By default, all products are visible to all stores.

By adding one or more specific stores to the "Limit to stores"-list, only those stores will see the product.

This feature is mainly used for retail chains, where certain stores are purchasing and selling products very specific to them.

#### Available for webshop

Option to, via Flow Retail, exclude certain products from being syncronized with the e-commerce store.

#### Exclude from statistics

Option to disable sales statistics for certain products, like gift card, etc.

### Conditions

#### Warranty conditions

Option to select a pre-defined warranty condition text (maintained under Products > Warranty conditions).

Used to inform the customer about specific warranty details, or any other additional details, that are common across multiple products.

The conditions text is being printed on the receipt to the customer.

### Package

#### Pieces

Option to set a custom number of pieces a specific product consists of.

Lets say you sell a sofa which is one SKU with one inventory, however it consists of two physical packages/boxes.

When receiving the product, and printing out labels, Flow Retail will print X number of labels for the product, each presented with "1/3", "2/3", "3/3", etc.

## Customer requirements

In this section you can add requirements related to the customer, before the product can be sold.

You can require a basic customer record (name), and email, mobile and/or a delivery address.

#### Age limit

You can also set an age limit (e.g "18"). This will simply inform the user to do an age verification on the customer. Flow Retail itself wont do any age verification.

## Accounting / finance

Option to set a specific accounting number for this product, in terms of accounting/finance.

## Media

Flow Retail supports adding product images to a product, either from an external fixed URL (e.g from a PIM or DAM or e-commerce system) or by uploading the actual images to the system.

To learn how to add media / images to a product, check the [Product Images](/docs/day-to-day-operations/products/product-images.md) article.

## Properties

Allows for adding any pre-defined properties to the product.

Read the [Properties](/docs/day-to-day-operations/products/properties.md) section to learn more about properties.

## Warehouse

This section allows for adding warehouse-specific details to a product.

### Max/Min

Set a pre-defined max/min value per warehouse.

This is mainly used for more efficient and even automatic purchase ordering.

#### Example:

The Min\[imum] is set to 10. The Max\[imum] is set to 50.

The product has 20 in stock.

When generating a purchase order based upon Max/Min values, it finds 20 in stock, which is above the Min\[imum] threshold of 10. Nothing is then added to the purchase order suggestion.

If the stock would be below 10, lets say 5, then the system would automatically suggest 45, so it reaches the Max\[imum] of 50.

### Location

Allows for setting a location value of the product, per warehouse.

The location system can be anything, though a basic yet solid system is using XX-YY-ZZ, where XX is the first row in the warehouse, YY is the first section in that row, and ZZ is the floor in that row.

## Suppliers

Allows for adding the purchase price per supplier (normally just one), alongside an optional supplier SKU.

These values are used when creating purchase orders.


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