Products are the foundation for the experience your customers will have when doing the most important thing - placing an order. You'll use them not only to craft the brand experience you like, but to monitor your business's performance and grow it over time. 

What is a product?

In the Flipdish system, anything that can be independently ordered is a type of product. This includes simple things that don't have options (modifiers) like a drink or a side of chips. It also includes complex items that do have options, like a pizza with toppings that a customer can choose from. A meal deal is also a type of product. 

Managing products in your Flipdish Portal

What is a modifier?

Modifiers are things that can change a product, but can't be independently ordered. In the Flipdish system, modifiers are not products. Some examples would be:

• Pizza toppings like pepperoni, sweetcorn, olives etc. You wouldn't typically see these as independently purchasable items
• Yes/no answer to a question like "Would you like your sandwich toasted?"

What is a group?

Groups are ways to group 2 or more products or modifiers together. A good way to think of a group and its elements are that groups are questions, and the elements inside are the possible answers. 

"Select toppings" is a question, and the available toppings within the group are the possible answers. 

"Would you like your sandwich toasted?" is a question, and "yes" or "no" are the possible answers. 

Groups can be configured in a number of ways. Learn more here

• Min/Max selection. With this setting you can ensure a minimum and maximum selection amount. For instance, if you require your customer to make at least one selection, then minimum would be 1. If you require your customer to only make one selection, then the maximum would be 1 also. 
• Can select multiple. With this setting, you can allow your customers to order quantities of the products or modifiers within the group. When this setting is OFF, customers can either select or deselect each of the elements in the group. When it is ON, they can select more than 1 of the elements at a time. 

What is the "catalog" and its "items"?

Your catalog is the container for all your products, modifiers and groups that you'd like to create in the Flipdish system. When you create a product, that's a catalog item. When you create a modifier, that's a catalog item. When you create a modifier group, that's a catalog group. 

Usually, this detail is not necessary for you to worry about, and really only becomes relevant if you're a developer looking to integrate with Flipdish. For developer documentation and all the technical details of how products, modifiers and more is done, see this article in our developer documentation

What is the hierarchy?

Put simply, the hierarchy can be described as item -> group -> item. Catalog items can be added to groups, and groups can be added to items (up to a depth limit).