How to Clone products

I' just new and have installed the essentials version on J2.5
No problems as far as bugs yet - thankfully.

1 question here:

Is there a quick way to clone a product. I have about 200 art images to enter. Obviously the images and titles are different but they all have the same variants on them and for the most part the prices are the same.

Any help appreciated. Thank you for your time.

THanks for your reply.

Dissapointing that I would have to pay extra money for a function that comes free with virtuemart.

While I am grateful for the built in help areas, I would like to take this oppertunity to suggest that a proper manual would be a great help. You need to take a beginner from start to finish setting up a simple store selling 4 kinds of fruits, within thier own categories, with size variants of small, medium and large (with respective price vatiants) and setting up the view areas of the front end, and the paypal method and shipping.

The benefits of such a manual would be
1. The learning curve for newcomers would be so much less steep and
2. You would have fewer questions (and delay for replies) on the forum. And finally,
3. It will also make this HikaShop shopping cart system excel above all others.

And if it can be done on video so much the better!

Thanks for your reply Nicolas.

With regard to exporting and importing. I've had a go at that and it is not as straight forward as I'd hoped because all of the variants have their own record and the real product number only increases every seventh row - so messy for editing. Although I have been successful in copying editing and importing, it is very tedious and time consuming.

It seems to me that it would be better if the characteristics table itself also held the prices for each variant (or zero for no prices). In that way instead of a new product record being made for each and every variant. just one field on the product record could have the characteristic id which would link to all those variants and their prices.

Say for example I have a characteristic record called "Format"
and the variants within that are "Print" "Laminated Print" "Framed Print" (etc.) and also the prices 14, 18, 45 respectfully
(For variants with different prices you could simply enter another record "Format2" with the new prices.)
Because in my scenario there are very few price changes within these products.

Then the product record would be
Unique_id, Product_id, Product_name, et. etc. Variant etc. (and the variant would hold the id for "Format")

In this way when I export the products csv, given that each product has it's entire data on ONE record it would be so easy to duplicate/clone this and edit for changes. (it also means that each Parent Product record increments by one on each row)

And similar to your present import which allows new categories to be made on the fly you could do the same for new Characteristic records holding the variants (it would hold one dummy variant to be edited later).
These could then be edited later (even with an export import) to show the correct variants.
In my case this would only be about 9 records in this table.

This is better than at present, duplicating all 6 variants for each product on the products table and giving them each their own records.

Anyway, that's just my suggestion which as I say suits my purpose for selling art pieces.

Thanks for listening.

Thank you Nicolas for your reply,

I had already looked at the options method and I tried that to see how it would look on the final cart. While this works OK for adding extras (as in the example given of a computer build) it is not suitable for the sale of artwork in this scenario. Imagine you are buying three or four pieces of art. The first one is a framed print the second is a different piece of art but framed original art the next a laminated piece of art and finally a print alone. on the final cart you would have a listing for each piece of art (4 listings), then a listing for the added frame for a print then the listing for a frame for original art then the listing for lamination another 3 listings) and it is not clear which one is attached to what piece of art.

This is just messy and not a real 'option' at all for this site. The user needs to see ONE entry on the cart for the ONE purchase they made. Like I say, I believe the prices should be held on the table that holds the variants, separating the prices is one normalisation too far and only serves to complicate, not simplify, the database. And getting back to my main point, it also complicated the records for the product which would only take one record for each product and not a further 6 or whatever for the variants applied.

I understand if you've invested time in making your product a certain way you will want to hold tight to your design. I'm just giving you my perspective using the product for my uses and in my case it is over complicated and not conducive to simple edits and cloning via excel.

Hi Nicholas, Congratulations on a FANTASTIC shopping cart, I am a beginner, but within an hour I had a product on sale. Now I just have to make it look prettier... (any top tips are appreciated)

I have to agree with the other Forum Poster here though about the CLONE/COPY button. I have used VM and that makes things so much more quicker to copy products. The excel way seems a bit complicated to me!

I understand you have to make money, but is there a quick fix? I would be willing to pay a little for cloning but not the big money a Business edition costs.

Anything you can do?