Issue with Product Custom Fields | [Idea]: Replace it with CMS + E-commerce data enrichment field type

So I’m in the process of migrating some of my CMS collections over to E-commerce collections… but I see a bigger design flaw.

The issue I’m seeing here is that the Custom Fields for Products is only creating 1 set of custom fields for general Products. The issue here is that products are not all the same… and I also find that in the future this could be Services entirely.

There’s also tons of space left here for adding of other Collections. It seems like it’s also extra clutter to have a separate E-Commerce section with essentially the same functionality as the CMS.

My question is that why not just add E-commerce as a field type instead of a collection? This way we could keep our existing CMS collections and simply add E-commerce attributes to a CMS collection.

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We need specific custom fields for specific collections… not just 1 product collection. Does that make sense…

  • Courses have… Title, Price, etc. & Intro Summary, Course Videos Count, Course Worksheets
  • E-books have… Title, Price, etc. & E-book Book Images, Audio URLs
  • Services have… Title, Price, etc. & Service Guarantees, Service FAQs

We would then not need to add every different type of collection (Courses, E-books, etc.) to a single Products collection.

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Essentially, it would be easy enough to (instead of adding a reference field) you add an E-commerce field which adds all the same fields as are in the Products collection… But adds them exclusively to a CMS item.

This means that it becomes data enrichment to the bulk of CMS content rather than the exclusive primary collection attributes which flip the enrichment onto a single set of custom fields… in essence limiting the user from adding high quality data sets to their E-commerce items.

@kkilat ?

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I’ve opened ecommerce for the first time just now and this is exactly what I am thinking @cjroe. but hey how cool is it to be able to add custom fields and the like OMG!!

Let’s say a website sells class bookings and retail products. You don’t want to be adding date fields to all products. Also you would want the store admin in the editor to be seeing a classes tab with an ecommerce icon or something. Obviously we want to minimise tables with the use of categories where possible but where entity attributes becomes unique to product categories this is going to get very messy unless there is an upgraded CMS item list view update that enable adding and sorting by custom views .

On saying that I bet multiple product tables would be a whole world of webflow dev pain… good luck

Hi @cjroe

Thanks for the feedback and I completely get where you’re coming from.

Though the UI looks the same as the CMS collections you’re used to there is more going on in the background users don’t see. We went this rout to support our future release of product variants.

We’re excited that people want to sell Ebooks, Courses and other digital goods and that is something we want to support in the future. However for our first release we are focusing our development work on stores selling physical goods.

Great feedback it’s appreciated.

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Hi @AlexN

Thanks for the response. I appreciate all the hard work that’s gone into the release and glad I can provide some feedback for your team.

With that said, I want to highlight that this isn’t really a matter of digital goods vs physical goods. The Products collection in the E-commerce section could have the same issues with physical goods.

For example, if I needed to decorate data around Shoes… that Custom Field data might be entirely different from other products in my store… let’s say Jackets.

My point here is that it appears that this single collection approach doesn’t allow for multiple types of products of have “unique” custom fields. They would all share the same custom fields.

So this is why I recommended allowing the CMS data to begin the data model, and the E-commerce to decorate it… Instead of the other way around. (regardless of the type of product/services being sold). It could make it more flexible for design purposes.

With that said, you could also just remove the Products collection under E-commerce entirely and allow for new collections to be create with the E-commerce fields attached by default.

Let me know if that makes sense. Thanks.

Reading it I wanted to agree at first. But mixing up products/services with the CMS doesn’t make sense from a Product Data Management perspective. I want that product data usable for and transferable to things like a shipping API.
Therefore I would love

  1. Allow for more nested collection (make nested collections more perfomant so they can allow for more collections)
  2. Webflow to make a stronger stance on PDM, more powerful and accessible than a CMS plus it seems to be rn