AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

I was thinking about going with AbleCommerce, But i need to find ways of doing what we are currently doing.

We sell wheels and rims,
If a customer buys a Set of wheels, It needs 2 rims, So i need to subtract 2 rims from inventory.

Also i need to keep track of monthly sales by product, and by Group. We currently have 5 Price groups for products. and keep track of them separately for Sales records.

Would i need an external software to run these reports and track inventory? If so what would you recommend?

We sell wheels and rims,
If a customer buys a Set of wheels, It needs 2 rims, So i need to subtract 2 rims from inventory.

You can accomplish this by creating kits and enabling the inventory tracking for products.

Also i need to keep track of monthly sales by product, and by Group. We currently have 5 Price groups for products. and keep track of them separately for Sales records.

You can accomplish this job by some customization. Most probably you will need to make some small modification in the sales reports so that you can view reports by providing a product price range.

Thanks

How dose the kit work? do customers see the kit.

How dose the kit work?

In order build the kit edit the main product in your case Wheel product, then from left menu select the Kits/Bundles. Create a new kit component, adjust it visibility and then find the a product and add it to the component in your case it will be the Rim product. Enable the inventory tracking for both wheel and rim.

do customers see the kit.

Depends upon the component visibility settings. For example in the below demo I adjusted the component visibility to visible.
http://demo.ablecommerce.com/ac7_stable ... 26684.aspx

Can i use kits and options as the same thing?
This would take care of my other post.

viewtopic.php?f=42&t=8854&p=38044#p38044

So i could have different rim options and it would only use the kit parts selected. So the customer could select 1 of 10 different rims. and it would put that in the kit and subtract inventory correctly across all my different wheels.

This will take some customizing because i need 10 or more options with 4 to 15 options inside each.

You can use options in combination with kits. For example you can create options for Rim product. Let say that you create a product rim with two options "Yellow tape and value installed(NO Charge)" and "Rubber Rim Strip". Create variants for these two options adjust their prices etc and inventory. Now create kits for the wheal product add a component let say it rim component, adjust its visibility to the visible and then add the above two variants to this component.

Regarding that you want the options to be more dynamic so a person cant select incompatible options.

This is not possible for the kits. You can achieve this on options as below
viewtopic.php?f=42&t=7936