Simple shop menu

Hello, congrats on a fine product. I'm very new to HikaShop and am trying to set a simple online shop. I am using J 1.5.23 and HS 1.4.9 Starter, which I'll upgrade soon if I can get it to do what I need.

I have about 10 categories of products, all food products. Most of the categories contain two products, one of which has only one variant and the other of which has about 5-8 weight variants.

On the front end, I have a standard top navigation bar already set up within Joomla with all my menus built except for the one for the online shop, and I'm a bit confused about the theory of how to do it.

I have set up the name of online shop menu as a HikaShop Categories Listing, so if someone clicked on the menu title instead of one of the itmes on the drop down, they see what I would expect: a listing of all the 10-ish categories of products I have.

I do not, however, understand how to create the items on this drop-down menu properly.

I simply want each item on the drop-down menu to represent one of my 10 categories, and take users to a category page that lists (in most cases) the two products inside the category. (In a couple of cases, 1-product categories, I want to go straight to the product listing).

In any case, I only seem to be able to produce blank pages... or something blank at the top (listing 5 blank pages; Prev/Next, etc.), with a listing of ALL the product categories below. This is not what I want, I want only a simple category page with the one category I've selected, listing the one or two products it has.

I gather this listing of all the product categories in the shop is generated by the "Associated modules" function. So I went to turn it off, and was greeted with an "error saving" as the page then had no content and then a REALLY cryptic and mysterious message indicating I could remedy this by putting things into the "Associated products listing for category 37" ????

I can't figure that one out.

Surely there must be an easy way to get a simple category page?

If there is, and as long as I'm asking, I would like to customize it to include for the two products it contains, the product picture and Product name, and I would like to customize the way the price is output. Instead of listing the default price on the product that has several variants, I would like it to say either a price range (from lowest to highest) or something like "starting from €XX.XX" rather than just listing the lowest price of all the variants, which is what I have as the default variant. I don't mind hacking the PHP but I need explicit instructions as I don't know the language at all.

Thanks very much for your help! I really like the product so far, I have been able to figure out and set up quite a lot without much trouble, you've obviously worked on making big parts of it user-friendly.

On the hikashop demo site " www.demo.hikashop.com/ " is a nice little menu entitled "CATEGORIES OF PRODUCTS". That is near enough what I want on my site. Currently I can create that but the menu is only appearing in the content area rather than the Position on the template that I have allocated for the menu.

This is what I have tried so far:
A) Create a new menu called store. Create a menu item (category listing) for that menu. Associate the category listing to a product listing. Under this option, the menu shows up in the sidebar where I want it but the when I click on it it is not expanding to show all categories. Instead the categories are being listed in content area and I can navigate to products alright. How can I ensure the menu expands and works like on the demo site?

I have also tried adding a new menu item to the main menu. I then selected category listing for that menu and associated it with a product listing. The main menu is duplicated to display sub-menus on side bar and only the parent menu at top or main menu. Again the categories display only in content area and I can navigate to products OK.

I have followed the documentation on creating the menus but that hasn't yielded any solution. Am I missing something here?

thanks for that. the side bar creation worked. still to link to products listing in main window though. I guess thats for another day.

Following your advice, I got it working but still one more niggle and it is this:

I imported hundreds of products using a csv file and that is how my products categories where created. Under images, I can see names of the jpg files listed but the photo is not showing up. Names are correct. Under Hikashop>System>Configuration>Files, I changed the "Upload secure folder" and "Upload folder to images/products which would a show up as a folder under Media Manager allowing a client to add product photos from backend. Again I suspect I missed something fundamental? How can I get photos uploaded from the backend and what did I get wrong this time i.e. why cant I see the photos (wrong folder?)?

One of my product pages is showing a button "Choose options". I want to replace that with product details like SKU, etc. Where are the settings for this?

thanking you.