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