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Products & Planner

Products: create items customers can order

Learn how products, storefront visibility, fulfillment strategy, pricing, and inventory work together.

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What a product controls

Cottage CMS Products dashboard with catalog search, category, status, visibility, availability, and selling-strategy filters.

Products is the starting point for catalog details, pricing, visibility, and fulfillment setup.

A product is the customer-facing item in your shop. Its name, description, photos, price, variants, status, and storefront settings live together, while its actual orderability is calculated from fulfillment setup, schedules, lead time, attached dates or drops, and inventory.

Open Products to review the catalog. Select Create product to open the five-step wizard: Details, Photos, Pricing, Availability & Shop, and Review.

  1. Give the item a clear Product Name, a short description, a readable URL Slug, and an optional SKU.
  2. Add a main photo and useful Photo Alt Text. Add supporting gallery photos when they help customers understand size, flavor, or packaging.
  3. Set a base price or variant prices. If you use Recipes & Costs, you can preview cost and a suggested selling price without applying it automatically.
  4. Choose whether the product uses Weekly Schedule or Specific Dates/Drops. This is the most important availability decision.
  5. On Review, confirm status, shop visibility, fulfillment, recipe, and optional Square setup before selecting Create Product.

What customers see

Customers see active products that are set to Display in Shop. They see your product name, description, photos, price or starts-at price, product forms, and a derived ordering state. A product marked Available can still be unavailable when its schedule is closed, a cutoff has passed, a date/drop is not attached, or stock is exhausted.

Common problems

  • The product exists but is missing from the shop: check Product Status and Display in Shop.
  • The product is visible but cannot be ordered: inspect its fulfillment strategy, schedule, order cutoff, attached drop, and inventory rather than changing only the storefront status label.
  • The price is wrong for a pack: use variants and enter the numeric amount sold in each option; a name such as “Dozen” does not multiply recipe quantities by itself.
  • A product was removed accidentally: prefer Seasonal, Sold Out, or Archived status over deletion when you need to preserve links and reporting history.

Next steps


Plan availability

Plan: Physical products and the core product workflow are available on Free. Digital products require Pro; see the dedicated article.

Keywords

products, create product, product wizard, product status, display in shop, storefront product, product availability, product slug, product pricing

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