Product Varients/Options Best Practice

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Hi,

We are doing a restructure of a clients existing hikashop store. The client sells 'weighted' blankets and other products aimed primarily for children and adults with special needs. Currently the store is massive with over 10000 product variants and we are trying to decide the best way to go about structuring the store as one of the main requests made by the client is to simplify the adding and adjusting of prices for the products. The store sells the following different types of blankets:

• single
• king single
• double
• medium
• large

Each type of blanket can be sold with a different weight starting from 2kg up to 8kg. This has been created as a product variant selected by the customer (characteristic) and increases in 0.5kg increments. specific products are restricted in weights i.e single blankets are only 2-4kg, while double are 4-8kg. Each increment of weigh (0.5kg) of the blanket changes the cost of the product by a set amount ~ $5.

• 2.0 +$0
• 2.5 +$5
• 3.0 +$10
• 3.5 +$15 etc
• ...
• 7.5
• 8.0

A blanket product has a specific range of fabrics that the customer can select from, each type of blanket has generic, boy and girl fabrics that the client would like to keep separated from each other. Currently there nearly 300 unique fabrics split among these 3 types.

Currently the system has been set up with ~ 15 different blanket products (Generic, Boy & Girl) X (Single, King Single etc) doing this has led to over 1500 variants of each product. Each product includes a weight range characteristic and a fabric characteristic

100 fabrics X 5 weight increments (2.0-4.0) this is then duplicated for the generic, boys and girls fabrics.

As you can imagine managing this system currently is far too time consuming and requires mass actions and exporting the hikashop database to update product variant pricing and images. The client and they would like to change the system so that they can more easily manage prices, images and other products details without repeating the process more than once (updating the same characteristic across multiple variants).

My question is what would be the best way to implement this structure? Any advice would be welcome.
Cheers

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the response, I think what you described is the way we will move forward.

With the fabric characteristic is it possible to assign a different image to each characteristic without going through the process of creating a set of variants and then assigning an image for each product variant? Either way using product options should help reduce the workload dramatically.

Cheers

Hi Nicolas,

I'd rather not rely on using CSV imports as we're trying to make the system as easy as possible for the client to update.

I've created a separate option product for fabrics with the different designs as a characteristic, I've assigned this option product to the main product with the intention or removing the need to create any variants of the main product (saving time to configure the same set of 100+ fabric images for each product). Is it possible update the main product image displayed with the image of the selected product option? Would this require editing the show_default or option view?

I did a search and came across this topic,
www.hikashop.com/forum/product-category-...ions-part-image.html
Does this advice still stand?

Cheers