However, this resolution in incomplete in my opinion. I’m a long time internet entrepreneur, and after about 10 years selling products online, I can tell you that this feature is INCREDIBLY important.
Right now, if I was selling single items, magento would be perfect, but items with multiple attributes, such as mine, I can’t even consider magento because it’s lacking an attributes/ options template.
For instance, my products fall into groups because of the options available. I have, say 20 products that all have the same basic options.
Size
Color
Trim
If I had to add attributes one by one, with over 20 products, this process becomes EXCEEDINGLY time consuming and wasteful. The quicker I can get my product online, the quicker it can get crawled by the SE’s, and I can promote it and sell it. Also, there is the manpower involved. If I’m doing this alone, not a big cost, but I’d never get it done. If I have employees entering products, they would not be working on orders, they’d be working on entering product options and not selling the products. I could spend a day on one product alone.
Now, in my current e-commerce engine, I can create attribute/options templates, that I can apply to a product. Once applied, I can then modify those attributes if they vary slightly.
Let’s say I create an attribute template like this:
Size
-Small
-Medium
-Large
-XLarge (Add 5.00)
-XXLarge (Add 5.00)
Now, with my shirts, I can create a “Billy Baldwin I’m Late to the Game” shirt that has all these option. Instead of entering them one by one, I go to a drop down menu of templates, apply it, and blammo, I’m done. All the options and price markups are done.
Now, I add a “Alec Baldwin Drunk Like Your Mother” shirt, and it has “almost” the same options. As the above scenario points out, I add the product, pick this template from a drop down, and it applies the template.
After applying the template, I remove
Size
-Small
Then I remove
Color
-Purple
BUT edit
Color
- Green (Add 3.00) and I change it to
- Green “no upcharge’
Then I edit
Trim
and ADD
- Multi (Add 15.00)
Now I did not have add each and every single one of those attributes all over again, and I could edit the ones that where slightly different. This is a humongous advantage and very efficient. Even in my accounting software, I can add and delete options. You don’t need a SKU for each and every one.
Further. When I pair these items with say PANTS, and each pant has attributes as well, my current system shows the kitted items and each items attributes separately. Like this.
Tshirt
Size
Color
Trim
Pants
Size
Color
Trim
After testing out magento for awhile, I would love to move to this platform, and support it as well. But these are VERY important features that I or any other multi-attribute product merchant just cannot do without.
Thank you for taking this into consideration. I hope the community understand the need for this feature.
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Updates:
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Ender278 Posted another thread at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/14891/
Concerning this post.
More updates will go here on this subject.
Keep posting your requests for this feature. This is what Magento needs to really be Enterprise Level.
@Rex148 - Current e-commerce engine is Lagarde Storefront. Now you know why I want a new one. However, this is one of those features that makes a lot of sense.
@David_gbg - I wont have “so many products with the same descriptions” In this case, it’s one product with many attributes/ options. If two products have the same attributes/ options, then it’s easier to apply. As with the case of the shirt. If I have a Gorilla Shirt, and a Baldwin Shirt. and each one comes in S, M, L, and Black, White, Grey, I would just like to create the attributes one time, and apply it to each product. Each product will have it’s own description.
I really hope this subject isn’t being lost on anyone, or on the magento team.
This should be bumped, as I would definitely LOVE to see this! With thousands of products requiring maybe twenty different option sets, this would be invaluable to me, and probably not difficult to create
On our platform now, we have an option to “use the same options as product code xxxx-xxxx” so that we can have a template product, and all similiar products mimic it. Perhaps that would be an easier option to implement for the dev team?
This is really a nightmare otherwise, and we cannot switch over to Magento without it as much as we would love to, unfortunately. I have heard the same sentiment from numerous other people as well, and I think that going forward on an enterprise level, this ability would be invaluable for serious users with thousands of customizable products.
I’m a little late to the game here, but very much concerned about the same issue. We sell bras.
We have one product line, with about 50 items, none of which is carried in stock, particularly, but rather drop shipped or ordered and shipped from each sale.
Bras have colors, cup sizes and band widths, such as style 1000, white, 34, B
With about 50 items, six colors, 10 cup sizes, and about 20 band sizes, there are over 26,000 possible combinations, and Magento currently requires that we enter 26,000 SKUS to handle our 50 products..
In order for us to move to Magento, which we’d REALLY like to do for many reasons, Magento will have to provide an option system of some kind, like the one illustrated in Rumblepup’s post, so that we can have one SKU for each product, with any combination of options we can customize as we need.
Relative to my comment about not carrying everything in stock. I’ve been writing software for business for over 30 years, and all those clients were in brick and mortar businesses with very little custom order needs. So, they pretty much had a SKU for each thing they carried in their stores and shops.
With online commerce, and the ability to pretty much order and drop ship anything, we must have this templating capability.
We currently run our store on the eCommerce module of OpenACS (a 10-year old platform), which has an elegant way of handling options, and works very well for us, although it isn’t as elegant as the Rumblepup suggestion.
Before that, we ran on ZenCart, which has a very nice templating system, and actually does a good job, is open source, written in PHP, and could give the dev team here a model to look at…
Thanx! I’ll be keeping in touch with the developments, because, for all the other features and power of Magento, we REALLY want to come over to it as soon as we can..
Just getting ready to post something like this in here, nice to see others want this same feature.
Let’s say you are selling sofas and you have 100 different sofas on your site. These sofas are different in style but they all can come in a selection of 50 different colors. To do this I have to go in and type out those 50 colors 100 times to get them to be a choice for each product. Then when a new color comes in we have to go back and add that one color, 100 times over again so it is a selection on each sofa. If a fabric is discontinued once again we would have to go back in and delete it out 100 times over again.
Not very efficient and very time consuming. A template system would be great for this as you can create it once and then apply it to a product when needed.
This is a much needed feature. It’s impossible to expect any company to enter all the possible combinations as simple products, just to be able to create a configurable product. With each possible style, size, color, length, the number of needed simple product goes up exponentially.
I just wanted to add a single product which comes in 36 colors, with 2 size ranges, then a second product which comes in 42 colors, etc.
Obviously, it would be great to have pictures of each color and style so the customer can see exactly what they ordered, but that shouldn’t require separate simple products for each.
Yes, each manufacturer may have a different SKU for each style and color, but to do this right, there ought to be a way to create the configurable product first, and designate a way to auto-populate the simple products, then upload images for those available using a table for generating the file names so that each name does not need to be entered one by one by hand.
Since I posted this, I ‘discovered’ CUSTOM OPTIONS, which, as of 1.1.2? is the last left menu item on simple products. This option gives me everything I need to accomplish what I need, since we physically carry only a few items in inventory.
If you create your category and put a single item in it that is inactive and has every size, color,shape option you need for that product group, then all you have to do to set up each item is call up the master item and duplicate it ( a menu option on the top of the page in item maintenance ).
Having duplicated that item, you simply change the options to the ones for this product (mostly clicking the little red delete button on the options you don’t want, change the SKUs enter the proper description and images and VIOLA` a new complete product.
In effect, this new feature of Magento gives you a complete template system, as requested.
I’m not even using an inactive master item. When I’ve completed a product, I simply call it back up, duplicate it and modify to the next item.
This is elegant and simple to do.
Now to find out how to import my customer base from the old site…
That solution works temporarily but if you have options that require price updates it is going to take you forever to update all of your product options one at a time on a per product basis. Having a tempate for this purpose would allow you to update pricing once through the template that would affect all of your products using this template.
Dustin raises the point of a discontinued custom option as well, it would be easier to delete or add custom options through one template rather than editing 200-300 products with 50 options per product. I think the only way to properly handle this would be a template system which could theoretically be based on the existing architecture in Magento employed in product attributes.
This is the first post i have seen which magento is lacking really bad on (custom options/attributes templates) I’ve been asking and asking for help but no one seems to understand. This is exactly what I want magento to upgrade the most on. I hope they put a lot of time into this.
Can’t we just send the magento team via Email our opinion, if at least 50 of us email them asking for the same thing don’t you think they might just do something about it?
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