Question about how to organize my products with 3-4 different Product Attributes.

Hello folks,

I have a question regarding my NopCommerce shop.

I have tried a lot of different approaches but I am unable to find the perfect way of organizing it. My shop is in floorball items which is a sport similar to icehockey. One of the items is a floorball blade, the blade you attach to your stick. There are several variables involved.

1. The name of the blade. There are a lot of different blades, so what makes sense is to make a product page for each blade.
2. The side of the blade. Every blade has 2 variations, one for left handed people and one for right.
3. The hardness/stiffness of the blade. For every blade there are 3-4 different options available. (for example MEDIUM)
4. The color of the blade. There are roughly 5 different colors for each blade.

Usually people don't really mind what color the blade is while the side of the blade is obviously very important. Stiffness of the blade matters too. All in all, of one specific blade (for example the one with name Unity) there are 20 different variations in the store.


Right now I have a product page of the name (so f.e. Blade UNITY) and I am working with Product Attributes but this has some disadvantages. I can make a product called Blade UNITY Medium, and then I make Color and Side of the blade Product attritubes. However, this brings the problem that people have to go through two boxes before they know a product is in stock or not. If they go to the page they first have to pick a color and then a side before they know something is in stock or not since the Inventory with Product Attributes does not allow me to remove the product variation when it is not in store. Furthermore, if someone wants to use the filter function in the Category page it cannot filter for the specific combinations because it does filter out a product combination that is not in store.

I would like that people are able to filter for available product variations in the category page (for example, show all the available blade that are Left) while it's still possible not to make 20 different products for this specific blade. How would you organize this? Thanks a lot!