In Uphance all products, sales and production orders are assigned a season. For example, you can create a winter season and assign products like jackets, scarves, etc. to it.
Seasons aren't set in stone, meaning you can always switch a product's season.
Every product you add to Uphance must be assigned a season. If you don't, the system will throw up an error.
For year-round products that aren't seasonal, you can create a generic season and assign them to it.
How to Add Seasons
To add a new season, navigate to Settings >> Seasons. Then create a new season by clicking the + icon. Next, select the season type, which could be Seasonal or Staple.
Then select the Annual season and Year. After that, enter an Uphance season name, a title (optional) Status, Prebook dates, Shipping dates and Description (also all optional).
Note: You can only select annual season and year if you set the season to Seasonal. Also, when you do, Uphance will automatically use the annual season as the season name by default, although you can edit and change it.
Once the season has been created, you can tweak the settings by hiding it, showing it in your B2B Platform, displaying inventory levels on your B2B platform, limiting sale quantity, etc.
Note: By default, whatever you enter as the season name will also appear on your B2B platform. But if you want to use an entirely different name on your B2B platform for the season, enter the desired name in the B2B Platform collection name field.
Staple Seasons
These are evergreen seasons that stay pretty much the same all through the year. Essentially, You don't have to plan for them
Seasonal Seasons
As the name implies, these are seasons that change based on, well, the season of the year. A good example is the Winter season, during which you sell protective clothing products like jackets and mittens. But during the Summer season, you switch to swimwear and light clothing products.
By default, Uphance comes with two sets of Annual Seasons:
Spring / Summer
Fall / Winter
You can always edit/delete and also create a new one as demonstrated below:
How to Assign Multiple Seasons to A Product
Once you've created a season, you can begin assigning products to it. Interestingly, you can assign as many seasons as you want to a product.
To do so, open the product you have in mind, click the Add season link, select the season you wish to add and also the product variations that will go into it. Finally, click the Copy price from the latest season of the variants button to copy prices into the newly added season (this is checked by default though).
After assigning the new season, you can also add extra variations to it, and this can be done in two ways: add from previous seasons or just do so manually.
A few things to note about assigning products to multiple seasons:
You can carry products across multiple seasons easily
You don't have to set the SKU numbers, EAN, or UPCs when you push a product to another season
It's easy to retire product variations in new seasons or add a new one
When you move a product to another season, it won't be affected on whatever marketplace or eCommerce portal (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc.) where you listed it
How to Merge a Product With Duplicates in Multiple Seasons
You may have products that are exactly the same in multiple seasons (same product identifier). This can happen if you offered a product in the previous year's collection and are still offering it in the current year's collection.
After a few years, you may decide you want to consolidate all of these into one product so you have fewer products to manage. The good news is that Uphance will allow you to do this while still retaining your color variances, sales order history, inventories, etc.
Note: Before merging two products, we recommend you take a snapshot of your product tabs so that you can validate the merge worked correctly, especially if this is your first merge as this will help build your confidence.
โ
Here are the steps to performing a merge action:
Step 1: Locate the product with a duplicate in another season you wish to merge.
Step 2: Select the version you wish to retain
Step 3: Select all the duplicates you wish to merge into the main product
Step 4: Hit the merge button
Once completed, the only active product will be the one you retained.
Hiding a Season
When you hide a season, it means you can't assign any product to it as it won't be visible anymore. If you've assigned products to it already, those products will be hidden as well.
To hide a season:
Navigate to Settings
Select Seasons
Click on the edit icon (pencil) at the end of the row of the Season you want to hide
Click the Hidden checkbox
Scroll down and click the Update button.
You can unhide it at any time by deselecting the box.
In this example, the Lufema season has been hidden and so won't show up in the All Seasons filter.
If you choose to show your seasons on your B2B Platform, it implies they will be visible to B2B buyers who visit your platfrom.
Additional Season Settings
Limiting Sale Quantities
This is where you regulate how products assigned to a season are picked for sales orders. Setting it to None means you can create a sales order for that product even if it is out of stock or unavailable.
But if set to Stock, it means sales can only be created if the product is in stock. The same applies to Available.
Additionally, you can choose to show or hide inventory levels in your B2B platform. To show, click the Display inventory in B2B Platform checkbox. Uncheck to hide.
If you wish to display expected stock (that is future inventory coming from a production order), click the Do you want to display future available checkbox. But for this feature to work, you need to select Available for Limit Sale Quantities.
Grant Access to All Buyers
If you enable this feature, it means all buyers in your B2B platform can access products assigned to that season.
Email Buyers
This allows you to automatically email your buyers when you add a new product to a particular season.
However, this feature is only available when you enable Show in B2B Platform.
Once you are done, scroll down a bit and Update the season.