Manufacturers

Overview

While this article covers manufacturers, you should know that vendors and manufacturers function in a nearly identical way.  Manufacturers are meant to help you define and classify a product as having been built by a specific entity.  The manufacturers are used in the drill down view, search results, and for drop shipping.  So they can be a key ingredient to you customer service and product discovery strategies.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There are no necessary tasks required prior to working with this article.

Manufacturers

Manufacturers are found in the People menu.

You'll notice that there won't be any manufacturers available at first.  You'll need to create at least one before the listing will begin to appear.  

You can add a manufacturer using the right panel.  Just click the New Manufacturer button.  You can also search for manufacturers here.  The search is discussed in more detail below.

When you create or edit a manufacturer, you'll have minimal required fields.  In fact, all that's really required is the name.

Setting Name	Description
Name	This is the name of the manufacturer as you'd like for it to appear to yourself and the customers on your site.
E-Mail Address	If you're using the drop ship functionality with manufacturers, then be sure to enter the e-mail address where your manufacturer wishes to receive new order notifications.
Drop Shop E-Mail Template	This is the e-mail template that will be used to send the drop ship notification that the manufacturer will receive.
Address Fields	These address fields are standard, resembling all other address field groups throughout the administration area.  Use these fields to enter the address where products will be sent from, but only if you're planning to use drop shipping with manufacturers.

Click Save Changes to save your settings.

Manufacturer Search

The manufacturer search is fairly flexible.  It allows you to enter a keyword that will then be used as a partial search.  You'll end up seeing all manufacturers returned that at least partially match anything in the name or e-mail address properties of any manufacturer.  For example, if you enter the term "ample," manufacturers matching "ample," and "example" in either the name or e-mail address will be returned.