Create a Mystery Item

With mystery items, you can delight your shoppers with surprise items. Shoppers can place a mystery item in their cart but they won't know which item they've received until they unbox it at home.

It's also a great way for your shop to move old or slow-moving inventory while still delivering a positive and fun shopping experience.

Although the product setup is similar to regular products, setting up mystery products is like setting up a product rule. When you set up a mystery item, you are setting rules for what products the system should and should not cart when this item is selected.

Product Requirements

Create a Mystery Item

1. Select Products in the side menu of your CommentSold dashboard.
2. Select Add New Mystery Item Product from the Add Product drop-down at the top of the page.

Add Item Details and Media

Creating a mystery item is very similar to creating a regular item in CommentSold. You'll enter item details, upload a product photo, and enter inventory.

General Info 

• Product Name. Enter a product name that will display to shoppers. Use less than 50 characters for your product name to avoid causing system issues. 
• Product SKU/Style #. Enter your preferred SKU. We recommend avoiding dashes, spaces, special characters, or over 50 characters when creating SKUs. After you have added a few products to CommentSold, you will see a suggested SKU here and can choose to use it. 
  • Note: Be consistent in your naming conventions and spelling for brand names and variants. Using a template can help you quickly create new products and keep consistency for typically used details. Learn more about creating templates here.
• Retail Price. Enter the price of the item for your shoppers.
• Sale Price. Enter the sale price of the item.
• Description. Enter the product description you want displayed for the item's webstore product description unless you have a description in the Online Store Description field. We recommend creating a fun, engaging description that also includes important product information. 
• Use for Online Store & App checkbox. Select this checkbox if you wish to use the same description for both the webstore and mobile app. If you have enabled the Same Product Description toggle in Setup, this checkbox will automatically be checked by default for newly created products.  
• Mobile App Description. Enter a separate product description to be used on the mobile app, if desired.  
• Custom Badge Text. Create custom badges for your webstore and mobile app products to catch a shopper’s attention and promote purchasing (e.g., Our Faves!, Going Fast, or Hot Item!)
  • Custom badges only display if Waitlist, Low Stock, Sale, and Bestseller badges are not applicable for a product. You can override this by enabling the Prioritize Custom Badge Over Other Labels setting.
• Shipping Price. If you have enabled the Custom shipping price/product setting on your Shipping Setting tab, you can enter a different shipping price for this item. 
• Category. Select a category for this product. Selecting a category will help you organize your products and improve SEO.
  • Subcategory. Select a subcategory for this product.
• Product Type. Select a product type from the drop-down for this product.
• Fulfillment Notes. Enter notes that will display for your shipping team during fulfillment.

Media Selection

• The Media tab is where you'll upload images for the product. If you do not have photos of the product at the time of creation, then you can come back to this step later. We highly recommend using your own images over stock images whenever possible to create a stronger brand image.

Selection Criteria

• Include Sizes. Select the sizes you will offer for this product. These will show as different size variants.
• Limit to Collections. Select collections you will offer for this product. Leave blank to pull from all collections.
• Min Days Since Posted. Enter number of days to include items first posted at least this many days ago.
• Ignore Customer History. Allow customers to receive items they have bought before.
• Min Retails Price. Include products at or above this price.
• Max Retail Price. Include products at or below this price.
• Max Cost. Include products at or below this cost.

Once you complete adding selection criteria, you'll see the number of Matched Items Per Size. Ensure your criteria generates a number of available options. This will keep shoppers engaged in the mystery sale while still making the experience urgent and desirable. 

Variants and Inventory

• Top Row. The row at the top of the table allows you to update certain fields for all variants at once. This row also shows cumulative totals for all variants combined.
• Drag and Drop. Use the drag and drop icons to rearrange the order of your variants.
• Add/Remove Stock. You may add inventory to all variants at one time with the - and + options or by each variant row individually.
• Variant Received. This checkbox reflects whether you selected this option on the Edit Product tab. If you selected that checkbox, then all checkboxes will be selected. If you haven’t received all variants, you may deselect the checkboxes beside the unreceived variants. When you receive these variants, you can select these checkboxes.
• Retail Price. CommentSold pre-fills the retail price from what you entered on the Edit Product tab. You may edit this information now if needed.
• Sale Price. Enter a sale price if you wish to discount the item. Sale Price may be used for temporary and permanent discounting.
• Total Cost. Displays the total cost of each variant’s current inventory. For example, if the quantity is 2 and the cost is $5, then the total cost is $10.
• Custom Barcode. Scan a barcode into this field if your product came with a barcode already on them, such as a UPC barcode. If you cannot enter a barcode, contact Support or your Account Strategist to enable this feature.

Tax Behaviors for Mystery Items

• If you’re using Avalara:
  • Mystery items charge tax based on the individual item(s) pulled by the mystery item parameters. 
• If you’re using a custom tax rate:
  • The mystery item itself charges tax. Even if the items pulled are set to not charge tax, the system will still charge tax. There is no way to turn this off for a mystery item.

Product Behaviors

There are some important things to know about how mystery items behave. 

• Your mystery item must be set up as a "final sale" product if you want CommentSold to pull "final sale" products as part of that mystery item. 
• Mystery items do not have the option to add custom shipping. 
  • However, items that meet all mystery item criteria and have a custom shipping price are eligible for mystery item selection. 

Checkout & Order Behaviors

• CommentSold will not offer a mystery item as an upsell item during checkout (SmartSuggest, Secondary Offer, Recommended Products). 
  • While a shopper might be offered the actual item, they will not be offered that item as a "Mystery Item" at checkout.
• Regular shipping rates apply to mystery item purchases. 
• You can exchange a mystery item in an order for another item. However, it will remove the red Mystery Item indicator on the order.

Other Behaviors

• If you combine duplicate customer accounts, a customer may receive items they previously purchased as a mystery item.
• Revenue from mystery items is not included in the Live History Total Revenue report amount when featuring mystery items on live sales. Learn more about analyzing live sale performance here.

FAQs

• Why are customers unable to cart a mystery item?
  • Check the mystery item for blank variants. If blank variants exist, you can remove or edit the blanks. 
• Why was a customer assigned a mystery item that they had previously purchased?
  • If a customer’s account has been combined with another account, they may receive mystery items that include items they have purchased before.
• Why is the Mystery item not being updated in the inventory?
  • Inventory for mystery items is not automatically updated with the available inventory for all the eligible items. The quantity for the variants has to be added manually in the inventory section of the product details. 
  • Why? This is by design. This allows you to choose how much of a particular item/variant gets sold this way. 
• Why is the Mystery item not carting/pulling the expected items?
  • Are the desired products linked to a Facebook post or posted to Facebook? Only items linked to FB will get pulled to orders
  • Was the item carted on the customer’s behalf by a team member? Mystery items manually added to the customer’s cart by an admin may not adhere to mystery item restrictions
  • Do the desired/expected items have inventory? Items with 0 inventory will not be pulled as mystery items