A customer is asking for functionality to manage SKUs in his inventory. However, from what he has explained, I am seriously considering if I haven't fully understood the concept of SKUs myself.
Example: he sells one specific model of cell phones. This cell phone is identified with an EAN code (bar code). However, in November he receives this product, for example, in a Christmas packaging, and with a different EAN code. Since it is the exact same product for him in terms of cost, inventory and sales to customers, he says that he uses a SKU for both EAN codes.
Does this make sense? Is this really the use for SKUs?
Thanks so much for your help :-)
This makes since since that is the purpose of a Stock Keeping Unit. Consider selling the same product with different packagings, it will still be the same product.
Related
I've started working on a new Magento webshop which has roughly 250000 different products. Each product can have different conditions (new, used, damaged, etc., each with their own price.). Magento doesn't seem to have a method to implement this at the moment. Of those 250000 products, there are about 150000 different conditions in stock and another 150000 conditions which aren't in stock but do have a price (which can be put on the wishlist).
Some numbers: 1500 categories, drop down attributes (country) with > 300 options, integer attributes (year). Starting with two websites 6 languages each.
I've thought out two solutions to solve this problem:
Grouped / Simple product structure
We create a grouped product which is the container product, each condition will be a different simple product. We'll relate these products to the grouped product.
The nice thing about this solution is that is pretty easy to implement, we'll have to import the data in the correct way and all the information is exactly presented in the way we want.
New Product type
We create a new product type which can have multiple conditions, each with their own inventory. On checkout the inventory is substracted. The problem with this is that implementing the CatalogInventory model in this way probably is difficult and building a whole product type is time consuming and bugprone in general.
The advantage of this solution is this that there will be about 2-2.5x times less products in the system.
Others
Are there any other options to solve this? Maybe there is a module that does all this?
In conclusion: Of course I prefer the first solution but can Magento handle that? Does anyone have experience with this much Grouped Products? The system will have about 550000 products (grouped + simple) products in the system, what will be the performance implications of this? What happens when the site grows and we'll have twice the amount of products?
Without knowing more details I'd lean towards using a new product type or just adding the feature independently of product types if you have a use for configurable products (I definitely wouldn't try to duplicate the configurable product type). I'd disable inventory management and use some additional tables which hold individual item inventory with the per-item conditions and maintain a separate inventory that way. Use events and overrides to control the CatalogInventory stock status as needed. Creating new products constantly which are largely duplicates seems like a hassle worth avoiding if this is a long-term endeavor that needs to scale.
However, the Grouped/Simple method might be a viable short-term solution and appropriate if the project is in it's early stages and can't afford a huge initial expenditure. If well-planned, a script should be able to convert all of the old grouped/simple products into your new product type when ready to launch.
Is there anyway to get product Id of product in Shipping module, so that for different category I can charge Additional amount.
for eg: i have to two product in carts. One is in phone category and other is in computer category. for shipment I have to add $5 for phone and $25 for computer . so shipment charge should be $30 dollars in frontend. Is there anyway I can get product Id and corresponding product's category Id in Shipping method collect rates method??
Please help me, I am in a deep trouble....I hope Eg that I provided , explains what I need.
Thanks in advance.
You can get the products from quote
Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getAllItems();
or
Mage::getSingleton('checkout/type_onepage')->getQuote()->getAllItems();
and iterating over those items (be aware of grouped and bundled parents and so on) will give you the category(s) they might belong to and you can make your conditions against those
This is only a tenable option if products belong to only one category. Unless something has changed in the last couple of versions, there is no data for quote items that shows the category context from which they were added.
WebShopApps.com has several already-developed solutions for shipping scenarios. Depending on development contract & budget, it may be more cost-effective to use one of their well-tested extensions, e.g. Shipping Override Matrix.
So, the site we are working on right now is going to be Multisite and we are going to have different pricing for each website. The issue comes when one of those sites needs to have two different price lists.
There is going to be the price list for one site, and another price list for the other and then there will be a price list based on the customer group for the second site. I am not sure the best way to set this up since the pricing will be per website. The only other option that I see out of the box is to use the tiered pricing functionality and set if customer group A qty 1 and above use this price. (Thank you Joseph Mastey from one of your other answers!)
I'm concerned about this since I am doing a nightly price update as well and I assume programmatically saving this per product could be a pain. If anyone has any tips on setting the tiered pricing programmatically that would be huge or if you have another suggestion I would appreciate all that come my way!
Thanks for the mention :)
Having looked at this before, you're exactly correct. The tiered prices seem to be the only easy way to accomplish this. I have thought about trying to use multiple store views to the same effect, but I haven't had success yet.
Also, yes, updating tier prices can be a pain, I'm not sure the APIs even support it.
The API does support updating tier pricing.
http://prattski.com/2010/03/04/magento-import-tier-pricing-using-api/
If there is a simple percentage reduction for one customer group then you can use a Catalog Price Rule.
ok... so I feel really stupid asking this question.. but just wondering about the Allow Countries drop down in the admin panel..
What exactly does this mean?
Does it mean that only certain countries are allowed to purchase from your site? if it does mean that how does it determine where you are shopping from? is it done using a IP Geo locator or is it determined when the user inputs their address on the checkout page?
or does it mean that only customers from certain countries have access to the site?
Regards,
Fiona
I believe it's a list of countries you are willing to ship to. Here's a reference that says this. The available list seems to be limited by locale, so no geolocating involved. No idea why this is done though.
The reason for this feature is so that you can use one Magento website to serve multiple countries with different prices or products. Say you have a German and an English store. You may have different prices and you don't want someone from Germany going to the English store and ordering a product which is not available for Germany or is at a reduced price.
I have a customer who retails third party batteries, and some batteries can replace several OEM models.
For instance, 3rd party SKU 12345 may replace Toshiba N23 and HP 53214, thus my customer would like to create two products with the same SKU in front end (they are essentially the same product). However, Magento by default does not allow duplicated SKU.
My current solution is to set SKU to not required from the backend, and add another attribute called Model that allows duplicated values, and display the Model in front end.
Is there a better way to do this? Or is it possible to allow duplicated SKU?
Tian Bo
Noble Technologies
It sounds to me like you've found a good solution. I'm not so sure you should try to have duplicate values for SKU for two reasons.
First the whole point of SKU is that it is a unique identifier. That's its only reason for existing. If you're going to have duplicate values, then it's not a unique identifier; it's just another attribute. But of course Magento still needs a unique identifier to work, which means that this is an extra field, which takes us exactly where you are now.
That said we come to my second point which is this... I'm not exactly a Magento guru, but I've built my share of e-commerce sites and one thing I've learned is that they depend on certain unbreakable rules to work properly. One of them is that unique identifiers are unique, both on the database and application level. As such, a large part of the website depends on this to function correctly. Which I'm pretty sure goes for Magento too.
So trying to change such a basic premise in something so complicated will only lead to horrors and a slow descent into madness.
This sounds like a good solution that I extended a bit further, however what I did with multiple store was to create a visible attribute ITEM_SKU (Item SKU) - make it visible and searchable and then concatenate the store_id to Magneto SKU to make it unique.
So SKU becomes (Store_id "-" SKU).
It surprises me how often people are willing to break who-knows-what parts of Magento, just to get a specific piece working how they expect.
The proper way to allow for duplicate skus is NOT to (unless you'd like to re-write large parts of the framework). You CAN, however, add a custom attribute to products that shares all the same settings as "sku" minus the setting that requires values to be unique.
Changing product pages, emails, etc to show this value instead will require a little extra work but will save you headaches later.
Why don't you create 1 product (SKU 12345) and list this product in multiple categories. So your multiple categories will be Toshiba and HP. The same product (SKU 12345) will be listed in Toshiba and HP.