Magento

Hey guys,

Just a suggestion for making it easier to create configurable products:

I sell lingerie, so let’s say I have a bra I’d like to create. They easliy sell in 30 different sizes and 2-3 different colors - so that would be 60-90 different products to be created manually.

The shop I use now (DanDomain in Denmark) allows me to create the main product only, configure it with prices, etc., and then simply select which size/color combos I need. The system then creates the individual products afterwards and link them to the main product.

The stocks can be updated, importing it from excel.

I think it would be really great if Magento could do the following:

1. Create the main/master product and select with attribute set to use.
2. Configure the product with name, price, description, etc
3. Select which attribute combinations to create. Could be done with a table matrix:

The system could create a SKU automaticly, which could be chanhed manually afterwards if needed.

It would surely save me a lot of time

Cheers,

- Jesper

Well Jesper, we obviously think alike… I just posted a suggest Product options page that sounds exactly like you are describing.  This product options issue is OBVIOUSLY something that is seriously lacking in Magento and I sure hope these smarter people than me are working on this FIRST.  This is a deal breaker for me.  I am not about to go through all this tedious, unnecessary input for even a few products that we have.

Paul

Tu bump this request, quoting myself from http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/9788/

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Hi, I’m new to Magento and so far it looks very appealing both from a users and a programmers perspective.
The only real problem I have found so far is the problem that you have to have a simple product for every possible combination.

johnmatrix - 10 June 2008 04:01 AM

If you think about it, doing it that way is the only way you can keep track of inventory for each size\color\etc.

This is true unless the outcome of the configurator is not in stock yet, or will never be in this very detail, e.g. if you build to order and only track the parent article.

For instance, I’m selling computer systems, most can be configured by the user. I cannot create a product for every possible combination, since a computer has like 10 to 20 options you could set, and of course I also don’t have them on stock. The options also change every week due to the rapid change in technology. And additionally, most combinations will never see the cart (who’d buy a high-performance video card together with a low-cost processor).

This is a real problem for this type of shops but I don’t think there is an easy solution?
The current method might make sense for Shirts and stuff, but not for anything more complex.

What would be a nice solution IMHO would be on-the-fly product generation (I know this feature from some ERP systems).
Example: You’d have a configurable PC with a SKU of ‘PC001’, but no simple products (yet). Now, when a user configures his computer and put it into the cart, the system checks against all existing combinations of this configurable product (the simple products). If the combination already exists, the corresponding simple product is used. If there is no such combination, the system automatically adds a new product and uses a SKU like ‘PC001-0001’.

From then on, this newly generated product can be used and administered like a normal simple product. You could even create some of this combinations beforehand (e.g. prebuilt) and alter the name or other attributes.

Does anyone with more insight to the code think this would be possible without tearing everything apart?

Kind Regards,
Ben