I have an e-commerce site that provides made-to-order clothing. I've created a configurable product and just one associated product.
Is it possible to display all of the possible attribute combinations within just one associated product rather than manually add every combination?
I've tried allowing out of stock products to be displayed, but this didn't show all of the possible combinations.
I'm not hugely experienced with Magento, but I've used many CMS systems and inventory management products. I've never once seen a matrix / configurable / multi-variation / whatever you want to call it setup where you didn't have to create each combination as a distinct SKU. I'm not saying it's 100% impossible, but I'd view it as extremely unlikely and probably a waste of time to pursue.
Why not just create your configurable products and their sub SKUs via CSV import? It will be far easier and faster than creating them one at a time. Creating every combination will also be extremely easy. If you're not comfortable with Excel, you need to correct that yesterday if you want to be good at product management.
See this article:
https://www.siteground.com/tutorials/magento/import-products.htm
Related
We have requirement to handle price dynamic (referring external system).
We would like to know, what is the best way to handle dynamic pricing among below :
Approach 1 :
Creating Price factory extension and overriding getBasePrice() method of customPricefactoryManager. Please confirm if it uses jalo layer.
Approach 2 :
In DefaultSLFindPriceStrategy we can customize getBasePrice() method.
If any other way too, please lets know.
We would like to know which approach can help to handle prices in addtocart operation, checkout and product page details pricing.
It is not good getting price in another system with integration online. ERP system used by few sales people but ecommerce site can be used by hundred customer in same time. ERP cannot be handle huge amount of connections. I prefer pushing price from ERP not pulling them from hybris side. On the other hand customer will be hate changing price while surfing between hybris pages. You need to plan correct time for updating price and re-calculating existing carts.
It is highly unlikely that you would need to override the above classes to get dynamic prices.
Hybris already provides OTB functionality to get prices for different-
Users
User groups
Currencies
Time range
If you are trying to get different prices based on above criterions then you can simply use the OTB price row model.Getting dynamic prices on different pages has many caveats-
The price on different pages i.e. Homepage, PDP, Cart, Checkout,
etc. might show different values confusing the customer.
It cannot
be indexed so the PLP page will almost always show a different price
value.
I am trying to make something like in the following link, using Magento:
http://www.gemvara.com/jewelry/cushion-cut-candace-ring-8mm-gem/cushion-diamond-14k-white-gold-ring-with-diamond/2fgxv
You can see that product main images and all other details change.
Now I tried configuring a bundled product with combination of two or more simple products, but this will create too many products.
Suppose I configure the following:
1: 3 products of stones
2: 2 products of ring base
3: Than the total number of products that I will have to create will be 3(stones) + 2(stone base) +6(3*2 bundled product with all possible combinations) = 11 products
For more options, this will be to complicated to manage.
How can we use Magento to do this efficiently?
There are two ways to approach this scenario, depending on whether or not you need to manage inventory stock for each combination.
If you don't need to manage the inventory for each possible combination, then you can use a Simple Product type and use the Custom Options to provide the various options to customers. You can put in price adjustments as well as the SKU that is generated when various selections are shown.
If you do have to manage inventory stock for each combination, then you do have to create — in your example — 6 simple products. Then you can present them using the Configurable product type. In this way if one of the rings is out of stock, the remaining 5 possible combinations are still presented to the customer. Still allowing them to choose a stone and ring base, but not allowing the combination of the one out of stock to be chosen.
So, it really boils down to whether you need to manage stock or not. With Magento CE 1.9.1, there are also more robust swatch image functions that might be helpful with what you're trying achieve, as well.
If you want unique images for every permutation, you will need to create each simple product to achieve this. To make life easier, you could create all the products in a csv and them import with Magmi.
In order to achieve the image option links, check out the latest version of Magento (1.9.1) which now supports option swatches and will load the simple product's base image which would achieve the effect you are after.
Best
Tom
I am using magmi to import products into Magento.
I have a long list of simple products in a spreadsheet and it is a right pain going through it and adding a configurable product row for each set of products manually. It is of course also error prone.
I wonder if there is a way of processing this sheet automatically to add in the configurable product rows. It's fairly easy to see when one set of products changes to another.
I've browsed lots of forums and tried to do it through excel but can't seem to find a way of doing it. Has anyone any suggestions please?
Check if this helps!
http://huztechbuzz.wordpress.com/2014/06/03/magento-add-configurable-products-dynamically/
Let me know if you anything else.
Auto creating configurables as a 'feature' may have several pitfalls:
Which sku to use for the configurable ?
What if a similar configurable sku exists:
do you want to "append" associated product list with simples listed
or replace the associated product list with ?
what if the file has :
simples with configurable product to create
AND
"real" simples that should not be associated to any configurable but share the same attribute_set
So, in a "generic" way, many questions may be left without answers and ,as such, couldn't be mass automated that easily.
However, you have a specific need , for a specific workflow, implying specific data. Then in YOUR case, you (or someone you can hire) can write a magmi plugin that would create the configurable according to YOUR specifications.
I hadn't appreciated the capabilities of the magmi configurable product plugin until I saw this: https://www.blinkdata.com/magmi-configurable-item-processor/.
This showed me it's possible to import all the simple products in one file, and then import the configurable products from another file. The "trick" is to have SKUs with two components, along the lines cccc-ssss, with each group of simple products linked together by a common prefix cccc to the SKU. The configurable product has the SKU cccc.
Creating the configurable products file is not easy (for me at least), excel doesn't seem to have the best facilities for this but I found the following helpful: Getting unique values in Excel by using formulas only. I used the macro by totymedli. [I use this as the list of simple products I have are grouped by an attribute that has the same value for all products that can be within a configurable product.]
No doubt there are better ways but the main thing is the amount of manual work I have to do, and which is error prone, is reduced.
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.
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.