Product variant confusion

Hi all,

We've been using Nop for a while now (1.9, 2.20 and 2.40). I'd like to start by saying what an awesome product we think it is!

It seems that with every Nop project we work on, we always feel slightly uncomfortable with the way Nop deals with product variants. I'll use our most recent project as an example. It is a clothing shop and therefore sells all the usual items, dresses, shirts, shoes etc.

Let's take a dress as an example. The client sells dress "A" in blue, red, yellow and white. They have it in sizes 8, 10, 12, 14 and 16. They have all sizes in all colours. This equates to 20 different SKU's (4 colours * 5 sizes).

The problem. The client only wants to show one product on the website I.e. "Dress A". The client wants the end user to select their desired size and colour when on the product page. None of this is a problem so far. We can list 1 product with 1 variant and add variant attributes for the size and colour. However in Nop, variant attributes do not allow for an SKU, and does not have any type of adequate stock reporting available when using variant attributes. So my choices are this:
a) List 20 products (1 for each size and colour). I think we can dismiss that straight away.
b) List "Dress A" and add 20 variants. Not a very nice solution as some dresses are available in 8 colours and 7 sizes (56 variants)
c) List 1 product, with 1 variant and add 20 rows of variant attributes. This isn't a terrible solution, but also far from ideal as the client will have no idea when they are running low on a particular combination of size/colour, in-fact I would say it would be near on impossible for them to keep on top of the stock situation in this scenario.

I would be very interested to hear your views, and it would be great to get some feedback from the guys at Nop on this one too.

Our second issue is more of a userbility question I guess. In Nop, when you add an additional product variant there are a vast amount of details that you can store - name, description, picture, price, is gift card, downloadable etc. To me, this doesn't feel like a variant, it almost feels like a completely different product. If the product is a bicycle, since when would it make sense to have the second variant as a downloadable product? When I look at this screen within Nop admin I try to envisage an ecommerce website I have ever used that has a product page, and then underneath the main product has a list of variants that are so different from the main product. I'm happy to be told differently, or shown examples of sites (not built on Nop) where this is how they list variants. I am perhaps just saying that I believe many of the fields available on the variant should actually be just on the product - would like to hear others views though.

Thanks in advance guys, and again, keep up the great work at Nop!!!

Al

You can search forums for "sku modifier".  Here's one where I make a suggestion

As for second issue, one example I can think of is a book (or music), where you can get hardcopy, or download the audio.  I think having more info at the lower level provides more flexibility (yes, for some, at the cost of extra input - yet many times the defaults are ok too)

higgsy wrote:

Hi Al,

Agree entirely NOP is an awesome product. I've been involved in ERP/POS (BTW eCommerce is just another name a Point of Sale and some parts of an ERP system) design & development for 30 yrs, I've also worked with more OS products than I care to mantion and IMO the quality of the work the NOP guys produce is second to none in not just the OS world but also in the commercial world.

LOL make no mistake and as my comments in the following links demonstratrate I'm not backward in coming forward in critisizing software co's that screw up with their product dev or use their market position to screw their customers over.

http://community.myob.com/t5/Upgrading-to-AccountRight-2011/Too-slow-solution-found/m-p/142856#M5613

http://community.myob.com/t5/Upgrading-to-AccountRight-2011/Windows-8-RP-Release-Preview-and-AR2011/m-p/142588#M5605

Look for the Gaz nic.

Soz for the political statement but the MYOB story serves as a warning to all and sundry in the US that Mit Romney & his Ilk must never be alowed to become the US president. Bottom line a fool that payed $1.2Bn for a co that at best (based on EBIT) was worth $180M, and the unscrupulous way they have begun to extort money from its client base says it all.

I digress.

That said I also agree that the product varience aspects of the system are confusing and not quite right from a usability POV or from a stock managemet/Sales entry POV.

The stock management aspects atm make it all but impossible to link NOP to 99% of ERP & POS systems, and more signifficantly make it very difficult to sell NOP as a viable replacement for the traditional in store POS system.

While not exhaustive, from my analysis the table structures are almost correct in that the field needed are already in the DB but just not in the the right tables.

For example ATM the product SKU, manufacturers & GTIN numbers, stock levels and pricing level info is stored in or has a relationship to the Product Varient Table. For the system to work properly the relationships need to be built around the ProductVarient_ProductAttribute_Mapping Table.

The other things that need to be looked at if NOP is going to achieve its full potential in the market is that it needs to cater for the fact that a product can be manufactured by different manufacturers who will of course have different manufacturers, GTIN's and in many cases pricing attributes for the same product.

The other concept that is fundamental and that is needed is the introduction of a product supplier because in the vast majority of cases a retailer needs to know about the manufacturer but does not buy from the manufacturer directly because they only deal with a wholesale suppler who in turn deals with the retailer.

An example of that would be say HP, yes they are a manufacturer but how many here actually buy from HP, if the rest of the world is like Australia then the vast majority of us will be forced to deal with a Wholesale supplier not HP directly.

The introduction of a supplier & the ability to process purchases into NOP would be a fabulous addition IMO.

The other thing that is an imperative is that these changes MUST be introduced first if NOP is going to eventually impliment a multi store capability.

Lets not copy the incorrect multi store capabilities that other eCommerce systems have implimented due to their poor domain knowledge, lets step outside the box & impliment a structure thats been designed by a true domain expert.

If its of any assistance I have done some analysis on the table structure changes that I believe would be required to impliment the above functionality including the multi store requirements, I would be happy to impliment the changes in an NOP DB and submit that to the NOP team for scrutiny & possible inclusion in a future release of NOP.

With respect the usability aspects related to adding products with multiple attributes, this could be achieved with what is known in the POS world as a "Colour, Style, Size Matrix" again I have done some analysis on how this could be implimented in NOP and believe that if the changes I've suggested above are implimented then an NOP "Attribute Matrix" structure could be easily added to the product creation interface to vastly improve the current multi attribute product addition functionality.

Look forward to the feedback.

Cheers
Garry

New York wrote:

Hi New York. Thanks for your suggestion, however am I right in saying that a feature that clearly a lot of people have put their support behind has still not been implemented more than 2 years after it was requested?

Thanks for your input guys.

New York, perhaps it is more flexible to have these options on the variant, in my honest opinion it is improving flexibility at the cost of usability, and for something it used in-frequently. i.e. I don't believe many users of Nop use the variants in the way they are currently designed.

Even if it does, which I can live with, there are still two major flaws:

- Lots of ecommerce systems would have product attributes as variants. i.e. the dress, in size 12 in red would have its own unique code. This is true of the majority of offline suppliers/wholesalers - they too cannot possibly manage stock without some form of unique code. I strongly feel Nop requires at minimum the addition of the SKU stored against the product attribute combination.
- It is absolutely imperative we are able to track stock levels using Product attribute combinations. ATM it is literally like having no stock control at all, as its frankly impossible to tell without checking each product in the system.

Again, I would really like to hear the opinion of the guys from Nop. Getting feedback into Nop and having it considered and reviewed is without a doubt the biggest barrier to working with Nop which is such a shame.

Regards,
Al

Hello,

I am wondering why the "Add to Cart" option disappears when looking at the product in a list (before clicking it), when you add a new product variant?

Is there anyway to get that "Add to Cart" option back?

Thanks!!! :)

aplese wrote:
If I understand well, if you have more than one variant and/or variant attributes it is required to take the customer to the product details so he can select the corresponding options (variant and/or variant attributes)

I had a feeling, alright then thanks!! :)

Hello,

I have another question.  When adding product variants into my excel spreadsheet why is it when I import the spreadsheet back to nopcommerce "Products" the variants are created as products rather than variants of that single product.

Anyone know why this happens and if their is anyway of fixing this?

Thanks!!

Hi there,

Did you get an answer from NOP on this or whether this is possible?

Our issue is similar in so much as we have a clothing store and want to manage stock and show availability based on item colour and size but essentially the item is the same e.g I have a jacket, the page then shows that I have the jacket in red and blue and in sizes 10 and 12, I need it to show that we only have 2 items left of the 10 in red and 1 of the 12 in blue. Can you confirm if you know this is possible at the moment in NOP or whether this is what your discussion is about? Your discussion was a couple of years ago so I am hoping there is a solution but I just don't know it yet!

Thank you!

I am using NopRoot Bootstrap theme
https://www.nopcommerce.com/p/1381/noproot-bootstrap-theme-free.aspx