A guide for UNSEENPRESS DISTRO CLUB vendors
A grouped product lets you show several of your titles together on a single page, each with its own price and its own quantity box, so a buyer can tick the ones they want and add them all in one go. It is the shop’s equivalent of laying a series out together on the table rather than making people walk back and forth between six separate listings.
Good uses: a complete zine series, an issue run, a back catalogue page for your own work, a book and its companion print.
What a grouped product actually is
The parent is a container, not a thing anyone buys. It has no price, no stock and no shipping of its own. All it does is display the titles you put inside it.
The children stay as ordinary listings. They keep their own pages, prices, stock counts and postage, and buyers can still find and buy them individually. A title can sit in more than one group.
Two things this is not:
- It is not a discount. The total is simply the children’s prices added together. There is no built-in way to make a set cost less than its parts.
- It is not a multi-option listing. If you are selling one book in a choice of editions, where the buyer picks exactly one, that is a different product type. Grouped is for several distinct titles where the buyer can take any combination.
Setting one up
Step 1: make sure the children exist
Every title in the group has to be published as a normal simple product first, with its own price, stock and images. Build those before you build the group.
Step 2: create the parent
In your Vendor Dashboard → Products → Add Product, set the product type to Grouped.
If Grouped is not offered in the product type list, it has been switched off for vendors. Contact the DISTRO CLUB admin rather than working around it.
Step 3: fill in the parent
| Field | What to do |
|---|---|
| Product Name | Name the set, not one of the books. “Harbour Works: the complete series” rather than “Harbour Works”. |
| Description | Describe the set as a whole: what connects the titles, how many there are, what a buyer gets. |
| Featured Image | A photo of the whole set together works far better than one cover. |
| Categories | File it as you would any listing. |
| Linked Products → Grouped products | Start typing each child title and select it from the list. These are the books that will appear inside the group. |
| Price, Inventory, Shipping | Leave these empty. The parent is not purchasable, so anything entered here does nothing. |
Step 4: sort out the postage
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that loses sales.
Each child carries its own National shipping fee, and those fees are added together at checkout. A six-zine group at £2 postage each charges the buyer £12 to send what is almost certainly one parcel.
Pick one of these before you publish:
- Concentrate the postage. Put the full cost of posting the whole set on one child, and set the National shipping fee on every other child to £0. The buyer then pays one realistic parcel charge whatever combination they choose.
- Set a free shipping threshold. Put National free shipping over (order total) on every child, set at roughly what the full set costs. Postage falls away once someone buys enough to make a parcel worth it.
Then test it. Add the whole group to a basket and look at the shipping total at checkout. If it looks like a parcel charge, you are done. If it looks like a stack of stamps, go back and fix it.
Step 5: publish
Submit the parent as you would any product. It will publish or go to Pending Review depending on your store’s settings.
Things worth knowing
Order of titles. Children display in the shop’s own ordering, which you cannot usually change from the Vendor Dashboard. If sequence matters, for a numbered run for instance, either ask the admin to set the order for you or name the titles so that alphabetical order happens to come out right.
Stock is shared. A child that sells out shows as unavailable inside the group as well as on its own page. There is nothing extra to maintain, but it does mean a group can end up with gaps in it. Worth glancing at before a fair.
Keep the group current. If you add a new issue to a series, remember to edit the parent and add it to the Grouped products field. Nothing does this automatically.
Groups and cross-sells work well together. A cross-sell on an individual title pointing at the group page is a natural route from “I like this one” to “there are five more”.
Quick checklist
- All child titles published individually first
- Parent created as Grouped, named and described as a set
- Children added under Linked Products → Grouped products
- Parent’s own price, stock and shipping left empty
- Postage concentrated on one child, or a free shipping threshold set
- Whole set run through a test checkout and the shipping total checked