Inventory Question

[Radiatorman]

I'm in the preliminary phase of migrating to AC7 from another shopping cart. I'm hoping for some pointers on custom inventory.

Basically I have 800 REAL items in my inventory. From the 800 items I have 8000 “virtual skus” or children. Each child matches to one of the real inventory items or parent. Only parents have physical inventory, not the children. So in order to make inventory purposes easier I would have the child product look at the parent product for quantity. From what I see there are two ways to go.

1) Kits/Bundles: I have tried this with Kits/Bundles. I can build a kit for the child with the parent but I am unable to get the child to rely on the parent for inventory levels. I have tried all kinds of settings but nothing seems to work. Also, since all my inventory items and levels will be supplied by my accounting system on an upload basis, I would prefer that the accounting system handles the kitting process and the website just sell items. The will make it easier for import of inventory and export of orders.

2) Modify Code: Another path that I have tried is modifying the source code to have the child always look at the inventory levels of the parent. It looks like I can change the Conlib page (only looked at BuyProductDialog.ascx at the moment) to submit the parent id for inventory checking. But this would mean adding a sql statement and editing source code everywhere inventory checking is taking place. It would seem ideal to edit the actual inventory check module itself but it appears to be within the CommerceBuilder.dll which I don't currently have access to.

For me, I prefer the source code approach but it seems I'm a little limited. Should I buy the entire source code or am I looking at this situation all wrong? Is kitting the way to go? If so, what combination of settings do I need in order to make the child use the parent inventory levels?

Thanks in advance!

[AbleMods]

Why not use variants as your "virtual child products"?

SKUs can still be dynamic and the inventory mode can be set to the product level instead of the variant level.

Kitting won't get you where you want. Kits are always based on other actual products within the storefront.

Beyond variants, you're trying to proverbial round-peg-in-the-square-hole. AC7 doesn't really handle "virtual" anything unless you're working with variants.

Modifying source code will only back you in a corner when the next Able upgrade hits your Inbox.

[Radiatorman]

That works... thank you! Now how do I hide the variant option? I don't want that to show.