Option / Variant / Characteristic Questions

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13 years 9 months ago #11041

Nicholas,

First of all, I am amazed by your responsiveness. I am currently testing the free version but I will upgrade to your best version the instant that I get it working.

I need to understand the Variant / Characteristic model implemented in Hikashop (HS) better than I currently do.

I have many, many options to my products. As many as 20. They are not 20 variants of a a smaller number of characteristics such as size and color.

It is a different product but you can easily imagine it like this...

Laptop computer: $1000
--- Add: Bigger Hard Disk + $200
--- Add: More Memory + $100
--- Add: Microsoft Office + $500
--- Add: Wireless Keyboard + $ 79
--- Add: LCD Monitor + $169

Now... If I can setup the shop in this manner... The most important question is: Can I build this model through the CSV import system as it currently exists. I believe that my pricing scenarios are most likely too complex to manually maintain inside of HS.

If I can't do this via the current CSV import mechanisms, how much would it cost to add this functionality and when could I have it??? :woohoo:

Thanks so much Nicholas (in advance) for your quick answer.

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13 years 9 months ago #11048

Hi,

You can't do such things with charactersitics and variants. The problem that you might face is the number of variants that will be generated.
If you have 5 characteristics with 2 values each (no bigger HDD/bigger HDD, no memory/additional memory, etc) that means 2*2*2*2*2 variants, so 32 variants. No problem.
If you have 10 values for each, that's 10000 variants for one product. That's not manageable and the system won't be able to load so much data.
As long as you stay under a few hundred variants per products, the system should be able to handle the load.
Above that, the solution should be to use custom item fields but they have two limitations which would need to be overcome before you could do that:
1. custom item fields are displayed for all your products. We would need to add such option in them to restrict them to a category of products or to a product.
2. custom item fields do not add any price when used. We could add another option to be able to set one product per value of a custom field so that the system would automatically add the product to the cart when adding the product...

It depends what are your needs.

Last edit: 13 years 5 months ago by nicolas.

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13 years 9 months ago #11059

Nicholas,

Thanks so much for the quick reply. There is good news and bad news in your answer.

Good news:

My products are as I described in the example...

For each product there may be up to twenty (20) options but for each option, either the customer either wants it or does not. There really aren't "variants" like with size and color.

The bad news in your answer:

That it would take a custom field to handle our needs, and that the custom field would show up for every product. Each of our products has options and those options are different than any other of our products.

In other words my situation requres a solution that handles options rather than variants.

Please let me know how to make Hika Shop work, even if it requires some custom coding.

Thanks so much!!!

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13 years 9 months ago #11062

Indeed if you have 20 options per product, that would mean 1 million variants per product if you handled it with variants so that's not possible.

Custom fields are not really adapted to your solution as they are.

The solution would be ta have a new type of stuff to handle that. You would have one product per option and each product could have one or several variants that the user could select and upon adding the product to the cart, the corresponding variants would be added to the cart as well.

We actually have a starting solution for that there is still some work needed to have a working solution:
In the file form of the view product via the menu Display->views, you can activate the options view by commenting the if(false){ code and the closing bracket after.
That way, you will be able to add products as options in other products.

Then, two things needs to be done:
1. Modify the file show of the view product to add code to parse through the $this->element->options array and build the dropdown options based on the variants of your option products.
2. edit the file administrator/components/com_hikashop/classes/cart.php to add the handling of the options selected: basically, you nee dto add them to the cart when the user add the product.

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13 years 9 months ago #11113

nicolas wrote:

Then, two things needs to be done:
1. Modify the file show of the view product to add code to parse through the $this->element->options array and build the dropdown options based on the variants of your option products.
2. edit the file administrator/components/com_hikashop/classes/cart.php to add the handling of the options selected: basically, you nee dto add them to the cart when the user add the product.


Nicholas, I am working with Shlazor so I will try to understand how to make this happen in our store.

The steps you outlined above...

I believe that is saying that you are going to add funtionality to allow the HS to work with options as opposed to variants. Is that the case? I would believe that a large number of other people need this funtionality as well.

This behaviour is required before our store can go live. Do you have any timeframe as to when this might be implemented and tested. We would like to assist with the testing phase as well. If this is custom work, please let us know how much this will cost.

Would it be more appropriate to switch the cost discussions to email? If so, please provide an address.

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13 years 9 months ago #11115

We would like to add that in the future yes. But there is no plan for it yet as not a lot of people had that need yet and that we don't have enough time to do all we have to do.

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13 years 9 months ago #11118

You site speaks of "Custom Development" for Hikashop and non-Hikashop requirements. Are you saying that the requirement for product options instead of product variants cannot be made available in the near term even as a custom development project?

Please advise.

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13 years 9 months ago #11123

You can contact us via our contact form for that custom work: www.hikashop.com/en/support/contact-us.html

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