Characteristics major issue with usability

Hi, I have a big issue i think with HikaShop.

I have 100 products and each of these have different colours.

So for example "Tshirt A" comes in Red, Blue, Aqua, Green, Multi-Coloured, Black and also comes in differing sizes S,M,L,XL etc.

Then i have "Tshirt B" which comes in Red,White, Grey, Black, Yellow, Purple and also comes in differing sizes XS,S,M,XL,XXL etc

Now how do i set this up in HikaShop with characteristics?

I created a Characteristic called Colour and in that I added all the colours (85) i would use for all 100 products. I also created a characteristic for Size and added in all the sizes (35) for all 100 products. So i have 85 colours and 35 sizes for all my products. Then for each product i add i choose these two Characteristics but it loads all 85 colours and all 35 sizes and all the combinations of them together. For each product i only want to select a few different colours and sizes not all of them.

If i do load all of them i have to then go through and delete hundreds of variations each time in the variants page for each product. This is in no way user friendly and frankly a dealbreaker for me.

If on the other hand i make multiple characteristics for colour, eg have "Colour 1" which has Red, Blue, Black, Purple and then "Colour 2" which has white,grey,green etc inevitably this method will not work as all products come in different arrangements of colours and so each group won't have all the colours for the product and so i will be forced to keep making unique characteristics for new products. Also this method is bas as on the frontend it displays the name of the characteristic next to the drop-down field eg "Colour 1" when i only want it to say "Colour".

Virtuemart 1.1 had a great way of adding in colours and sizes for each product that wasn't complicated and also was easy to customise for each product. Even Redshop has an easy way of doing this, however it seems HikaShop hasn't been designed to do this.

Ideally i want to have a Characteristic called "Colour" and in that have 85 colours. Then for each product i choose that characteristic and then before the next stage where it adds all the variants i want to delete the colours from that characteristic that are not applicable to each product. Then once i have deleted the colours and sizes that are not applicable to the product then i can click a button and it will create the variants of the colours and sizes of those combinations.

Can you please let me know how this can be achieved?!

many thanks

So technically it can work, but it means i have to go through and delete hundreds of combinations of colours and sizes which the product doesn't even come in. Very frustrating.

Also in the main product backend page, the characteristics still show all the options. the drop-down fields here should only show the variants that exist. For example, i have deleted all variants apart from Black and Small but in the product backend page i can see all the colours and sizes drop-downs.

Not very user friendly again.

The other issue with this way, albeit minor, is that every time you add these hundreds of variants it is actually creating a new product id for each one. Then after you delete all the ones that are not relevant to the product the product ids are hundreds of numbers apart. This just makes things a little bit more confusing, and even with a hundred or so main products in the store you start to have really weird and high ID numbers for products (eg 2413 and then next one is 2498) etc which is just strange.

I think this part of the extension should be revamped a little to make it easier.

(apart from that i am very pleased with the overall extension )

Yes, we're well aware that the interface for characteristics could be improved for such cases.
It's in the todo list but there is no quick and easy way of changing it, otherwise it would have already be done.

Hi Nicolas,
I have a few other shops which I won't be able to use HikaShop with as each item has about 20 colours and also different sizes and there will be 1000 items. So the colour characteristic will be about 200 colours long. So each time I go to add a variant to a product i will have to sift through and delete literally thousands of variants per product. That is just a nightmare.

The best scenario would be to have it so that you can 'Add' the two characteristics 'Colour' and 'Size' but then when you click the 'Manage Variants' button, instead of being taken to the variants page a modal window pops up and you have to select the values of each characteristic that you want to use. So before it automatically generates all the variants of all the values of the selected characteristics you can select which values of each to use. Then once you have selected only the values you want, it then generates the combinations of variants of these values.

It sounds pretty easy to do but i'm sure it is quite a bit of effort but i think it really is a very important feature/fix to do asap. Hopefully it can be included soon

thanks again

Another important improvement to the Characteristics system is when you have an existing product and it only has certain variants but then you get more stock of the same product in different variants you then can only manually add each one in at the Variants page. This is quite time consuming and would be good if again there was an option to have a modal popup where you could select the values of characteristics that you want it to generate the new variants from.

For Example, Shirt A is added to your store with colours Black, Green and Red and sizes S, M, L, XL. You sell all of the stock you have apart from a few Black shirts in small. You get in more stock of the same product (same SKU, same price, same weight etc) and you want to add the new stock into the system. The new stock is in 10 different colours with 7 different sizes. The only way to add these into the system is manually in the Variants page one-by-one for all the combinations. This takes hours. Need a quick and simply way of generating the new variant combinations.

Hopefully you can put this on your to-do list when you improve the characteristics system.

Yes, that's good ideas. I put a link to this thread in the todo list for that one

Just wondering if you have had a chance to look at this yet?

No, not yet.
It won't be before several months. We are working on a wishlist feature and on the multi vendor system at the moment among a few other things.

Hmmm I would have rated this a higher priority than either of those things. This is basic functionality of have variants to a product which would seem to me to be fundamental to a shopping cart....

Indeed, having variants to a product is fundamental to a shopping cart and more important than these features. That's why it's possible since day one in HikaShop.
Redoing the variants management interfaces already there to improve the usability is less important though.

Hi, I solved this (kind of) by making several characteristics with the same name and different alias.

Name: Color
Alias: color-t-shirt
Colors: red, blue, green

Name: color
Alias: color-pants
Colors: blue, black

When you select the characteristics you get the name and the alias, so, it's not hard to choose the one you want.

And I don't delete the options generated, I only unpublish them, so, if in the future I need them, I have them.

I hope it helps.

Daniel.

Hello. I'm in the same situation in regards to having create many different characteristics of size and color for an apparel store I'm working on. Is the Characteristics interface close to being 'modified' making it more user-friendly in cases such as this?

Thank you!

Hi,

It will be done this year. We've already reworked the whole product edition interface for HikaMarket and all that's left is to implement the new characteristics system to it. Then, we'll backport the new interface to HikaShop. So you'll actually be able to manage characteristics/variants of products more easily via HikaMarket's frontend edition interface before it will be available directly in HikaShop.

Awesome, thanks for the update!

- Wesley

Has this been implemented yet? looking at using hikashop again but not without this basic usability

Not yet. It's high on our todo list.

I have been watching this tread and hoping for a fix to this.

I would like the characteristic appended to the code instead of numbers... when we put 'Sizes' and 'Colors' characteristics together we get tons of random numbers. We have to change EVERYONE otherwise we do not know what the product is on the order form!

Characteristic Code Example: H500_Montogmery_34_8_21
Shipping department has know clue that this is supposed to be: H550_Montogmery_4XL_Tangerine

Then why base yourself on the code and not the product name which includes the characteristics values selected automatically ?

That is a good work around… However we really do not like the 'characteristics' displaying on the page when users are in the shopping cart. Maybe we will try removing this from the product page views.