New more user friendly product/variants logic. Let's discuss

montanehamilton wrote:

Hi montanehamilton,

I've use NopCommerce several times for customer's that I have worked for in the past, and now I have a customer that sells supplements and wants to offer a 90 day supply of varying quantities of three different "Simple" products.  Within that, they also want to "optionally" offer a recurring order, but that lack of optional functionality will be for another thread.  I've always understood this type of product configuration as a "Kit" or "Assembly".

I've been reading this thread and several others all night to understand how the new Simple, Grouped, and Bundled Products now work in 3.1.  The explanation between simple, group and bundle products provided by A.M. at: https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/24244/new-more-user-friendly-productvariants-logic-lets-discuss.aspx?p=7#100550 seems to still miss the point that:

    1) some products need to be comprised of two or more other products (a kit)
    2) the individual included product quantities used to create the kit will vary
    3) the kit will be sold for a different price than that of the combined product price
    4) inventory needs to be decremented for each individual product in the kit when sold
    5) customer does not want or care to choose the items or quantities contained within the kit, they just want to buy it and have everything arrive in a single box.  It's up to the warehouse to put the correct products and quantities into the box.

I still cannot understand or see how this is possible within this version.  I have read threads as far back as 2008 where this feature to create a kit has been requested.  So far, I think that you are the only one that "Gets It".  The current thought process by the Nop team seems to keep shifting towards a bundle build on product attributes which is good if you wand to "Build" a computer which, in the end, is still a "simple" product.  The need to create a kit has never been addressed.  

I know that you have done a lot of work on your fork, but it seems that with the release of 3.1 that these features could have been added by treating a product group as a product.  Within that, allow the setting of a price and defining the quantities for the associated products.  I believe that this is a feature that is need and should be added as soon as possible, so hopefully, they will take another look at what you have done and reconsider adding it.

If I'm missing something in this version that allows for building a kit, then I need some to demonstrate how it can be done.

I too would love to see the NOP teams functionality do what I need. On the other hand I think there is a fundamental problem with the model they have chosen.

Designing with an OO mentality I think makes it clear something is out of whack. A kit or a bundle is in fact "a collection of individual SKUS". The kit itself is a "virtual product" that is only used to bring everything together under one name. Each SKU is a "product" that can be inventoried itself.

That said treating a kit as a template of n number of SKUS makes real sense. Treating the kit items as an attribute of the kit seems to miss the point, if only slightly.

Now I understand that not all users of NOP need nor want to inventory each item sold in bundles but I believe it's functionality that should exist. In the end I believe both ways should co-exist and my choices to uses variants underneath the covers meant that with only additions to the model I could order a kit just fine.

As I go and drive the "kit" display customizations through the cart I am running into more logic changes, but still pretty minimal. I will need to change the orders model to store the additional field of orderitem to parentorderitem (one new column). With that I have the meta data needed to drive display and logic customizations to all parts of the process, store, cart and admin.

I am using NOP 1.9 and would like a more robust search function. Is there a setting where I can tell NOP to show all results containing any words searched for?

For example, if someone searched "doggie bed", nop returns all values where doggie and/or bed exist?

PETMYWIENER wrote:

Although, this is not related to the current topic. It does merit discussion. I have created another topic to discuss this matter in.

Hello,

Could someone please tell me how i could do this: http://nopdemo.montane.org/sample-kit-3
I would like to have 1 kit with 5 products.
these products must also be bought separately, but within the kit the costomer gets a discount.

Thanks!
Patrick

anyone an idea ?
Thanks!

Hi montanehamilton,

Is het set-up as seen on this page: http://nopdemo.montane.org/sample-kit-3 standard nopcommerce setttings ?
Could someoneplease tell me how to do this ?

Thanks!
Patrick

My demo is based on my code. The nope team took a totally different approach in the end, perhaps they'd like to help explain.

Hi Andrei,

I am replying regarding post 100550 where you write :

A "simple" product can have only one parent "grouped" product. Actually the same way in the previous versions, a product variant had only one parent product. So nothing has been changed here. Of course, it's possible to have several "parent" products with some extra coding. But in this case additional mapping table could slow down the system a bit (extra joins). So I just implemented as it was in the previous versions.


I am actually looking for such a functionality, where I can have the same product variant /child product associated to more that one parent product. I see that you mentioned something to this effect- is this something that can work? Is it something you already have working?

Any help is appreciated .

Thank you,
kelly

I'm looking for some kind of Documentation? Based on my experiments, this version fails to provide anything for me:

Color: Blue    Stock Quantity
Size: 7        1

Color: Purple    Stock Quantity
Size: 8        2

I have tried the basic setup above and cannot get quantity to work. Besides the pull-down not updating, it will accept any value for quantity beyond Stock available. Without being able to adjust quantities for multi-variants, this is worthless. What am I doing wrong?

And if I were to add an additional Variant? forget about it...... I want multiple pictures for each variant not just one..... So I know this system won't work for me.....



I just have simple products for each possible variant and group them into categories. Its the only viable and technically feasible solution I see for my store:

http://jevell.com/stud