Best Way to Manage Product Addons???

drollins · Post by **drollins** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 10:10 am

My customer (site owner) requires that their customers choose from a list of images they wish to have their purchases engraved with - they charge an extra fee for this, there are 100s of images to choose from, this option applies to all products in the store (100s).

I've experimented with both accessorial products and kits and I am not clear on the best way to do this.

Accessorials only work once for a given cart (IOW if the customer buys product A with accessory Product Z then also puts product B in their cart... your end up with 1 of each - not 1 Z for everything you ordered - plus the identiry of what you are choosing is not too clear.

With kits I can do pretty much exactly what I want but now I have to add like 125 things to choose from in a kit dropdown for EVERY product in the store (100s) -

Is there a way to create a kit or something that I could then staple to products so that during the checkout process what they choose from is like the kit behavior, self explanitory since the kit choice is on the order?

This is something they are looking for ASAP so I am under the gun here.

Post by **Shopping Cart Admin** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 10:22 am

Hello David,

Create 1 kitted product with the selections that you need. Then you can attach these selections to any product which requires them. This way if they change in the future you only have to change them in one place.

You'll find the following on the add component screen.

Code: Select all

Search for the existing component to attach or copy for this kitted product. If you wish to create a new component for this kit, click here.

drollins · Post by **drollins** » Wed Dec 26, 2007 3:04 pm

So you mean I will add this "component" to any product that needs this behavior.

The end result should be that on the product detail screen where the customer enters personalization information they can also choose component options - if this works this way then this is good.

drollins · Post by **drollins** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 2:46 am

OK - I got it - that works nice.

Now... if you guys just created a way to easily import all 175 options that will go in this drop down for this component I'd be one happy camper.

drollins · Post by **drollins** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 3:30 am

Was there a reason why you guys (able) decided to duplicate the ac_kitproducts entries for each product you attach the component product to? Seems wicked redundant to me without understanding your reasoning.

You already have the ac_productkitcomponents table to xref them - you could have just created one row in this table to the same ac_kitproducts group instead of duplicating the whole thing.

The reason I ask is that I have a kit I am building with 175 things that will show in a drop down.

The store will have 500-1000 products - so this table (ac_kitproducts)alone will end up with between 87,500 and 175,000 rows in it if I do this like I the way I see you're doing it. That seems a bit excessive to me.

So I am wondering if I simply normalize this and create one kit (instead of 175) but link it to each product via ac_productkitcomponents that this wont work nice.

Anyways - I will report back with my findings.

jmestep · Post by **jmestep** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 8:02 am

When you add the component to the main product, you can either attach it or copy it. Copy enables you to duplicate all the component products, but you can then change them if you want. Attach just cross references the component products and if you change price in one place, it changes it in all products where you are using the component.

drollins · Post by **drollins** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 9:39 am

Ahhh - I will check that out - I do not remember whether I clicked attach or copy - (I thought attach).

One other thing ... I have no control programmatically how these kit fields are displayed - I can do stuff like NOWRAP but that's about it - can this stuff be exposed as a conlib user control at some point so that we have total control over how this stuff is rendered?

jmestep · Post by **jmestep** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 9:53 am

Some customization can be done in the AppCode/ProductHelper.cs. I am hoping the final build will allow more because right now, the customer HAS to select a kit product. In 5.5, you could have something like "select" in the dropdown and customer didn't have to select something if they didn't want to.

drollins · Post by **drollins** » Sat Dec 29, 2007 5:50 am

OK - the "attach" works as advertised and my nightmare concerning inserting 175000 records is now over... whew.

jmestep · Post by **jmestep** » Sat Dec 29, 2007 1:27 pm

That's good. The kitting part is an area where Able got a lot of feature input on and spent a lot of time making it powerful and versatile.