We sell nutritional products for animals. The same product may come in different size containers (e.g. pint, quart, and gallon) because the number of animals being fed influences the amount of supplement the customer needs to have on hand.

For instance, if a customer only shows one horse they might purchase hoof dressing in the quart size. For three or four horses and lots of showings they might buy it by the gallon. (I know it's not a supplement, but I could put the example together quickly and the concept is the same.)

Now my problem, how do I make both products orderable on the same page as the description. These are not quantity or volumn discounts. The products have seperate SKU's and seperate pricing from the manufacturers. I also need to pick up the shipping weight for shipping calculations.

What I am trying to accomplish is something like what I have built at http://www.culpeperfeed.com/gensym-142.html

My first look at the variants doesn't look like it will work.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Tom

Hi Tom-

Our variant system in version 4.0 should work for you. You can make your variants be "advanced" which gives them seperate pricing, weights, stock quantites, and you can even add part numbers. If you are on version 3.x, and you have selected to migrate to 4.0, you should have this functinoality in the very near future.

YEAH!!!!!!! AWESOME!!!!!!!
I have been asking for a long time if this will happen Sabre!!
I need variant weights real bad!
Tom - We currently also offer the same product in many different sizes. At this moment we currently put the shipping weight at the highest weighing variant, but in V.4 we will now have the ability to have each variant be a different weight and get actual shipping costs for what is being shipped.
Thanks Sabre, man I love !

OK, good start. I created a variant group called GP Pine Tar (for horses hoofs and usefull for baseball bats). The item has a price of $0.00 and each variant has a surcharge that is the actual price of the item.

Under that variant, I built variants called Pint, Quart, and Gallon. I like the way the display works. You have a drop down window with Pint, Quart, and Gallon and as you select each one THE PRICE CHANGES. Is that cool or what?

But nothing is perfect.

Definitely and option I needed as well. stays on top of things I'll give them that. I feel like a kid at Christmas waiting for my turn to migrate.

Sorry, I lost part of the last post. Here's the rest:

What didn't go right in the variant config is this, when I went to advanced config and entered the price and weights they all rounded to nearest whole number. In other words, for quart I entered a price of 4.60 and for weight 2.33. When I click on update they round to 4 and 2 respectively.

Am I doing this right?

For the item Pine Tar, under the general tab the customer price is 0.00. Under the variant tab there is a variant group called GP Pine Tar with three "sub items" called Pint, Quart, and Gallon. Each sub item has a surcharge (2.40, 4.60, and 16.12) entered beside it and display surcharge is checked.

Under Advanced Variants, there are three sub-items listed. I enter surcharges of 2.40, 4.60, and 16.12. Quantities are 100 for each sub items. And Weights of 1.33, 2.33, and 10.00,

When I hit update all, the surcharges round to 2, 4, and 16 while the weights round to 1, 2, and 10.

When I go to the site, the drop down is there when I select the item (pint, quart, or gallon) the price that is displayed is the rounded price.

Any suggestions?

Tom

Correction, it's doing straight rounding. 2.40 becomes 2 and 4.60 becomes 5.

Tom

Hey Tom,
I don't why its rounding for you, I have yet to work with V.4 myself, I would submit a trouble ticket in tech support.
But, I do have a suggestion, instead of putting the price at $0.00, make the price the lowest variant price, i.e. - pint is $1.00 and everything else is $1.75, $3.00, etc.
Set the main price at $1.00 and for variants make pint a $0 surcharge and everything else a surcharge of the price above $1.00 - $.75, $2.00, etc. The system will automatically update the price when the variant is chosen. This way customers aren't confused when a $0.00 (technically free) product becomes $2.00.
Just a thought

That's a whole 'nuther issue.

You are correct in that I don't want the item to appear to cost $0.00. But I don't really want it to look like it costs $2.40 either. I need a way to hide the item cost.

With the way the drop down box works, (the price changes as each item is selected) the user would have to select each size to see it's price. So in the body of the item description, I will have to list the prices for each size. This will make price updates interesting and open to errors. Especially for some of the animal feeds, where the prices change as the price for corn, oats, barley, etc changes. (Cool little piece of prgramming with the price automatically changing though).

I could put the price in the description in the drop down box but then the customer has to scroll through the entries to see the prices for each size.

Another issue that I see is that I can't offer free shipping on some items but not others. We tend to offer free shipping on items weighing less that 2 pounds. Where we have three sizes, like the example, it's quite likely that the pint has free shipping but the quart and gallon do not. In the shipping instructions, I think that I have read of a way to handle this. I'll have to go back and check.

I'll send in a trouble ticket on the rounding error and spend some more time tonight looking for ways to make the variants work for me.

Tom

What I do for my variants so that I don't have a 0.00 is to have at least one of the items, usually the lowest price as the default and from there the variants over and above are different in price..

Hope this helps even a little!

Sorry, somehow when I'm typing I'm hitting a key that sends the post. I'm working off of the laptop and the keyboard is a little cramped so I'm not yet sure which key it is.

The other half of the issue is pricing updates. Using the variants as they're setup means that the prices for the items (other than the lowest cost one) are actual cost minus lowest cost item. In other words if I have three items with prices of:

small - $1.50
medium - $5.00
large - $10.00

I would have to have the prices above written into the product description and the pricing in the system, using advanced variants, would be:

small - 1.50
medium - 3.50
Large - 8.50

This means that when updating prices, I have to make sure that the text in the description is correct and make sure the variant calculation is correct. I think that's a situation ripe for human error.

Keeping in mind that commodity prices affect our prices so they change regularly (many of them monthly) am I making a mountain out of a mole hill?

I appreciate the sugestions.

Tom

The variant system in the v4.0 is great! One of the products that we carry are viatamins, available in assorted sizes and sometimes brands. With the variant system, we just have 1 product listing and then the variant system lets you add to the product number any suffix that you want.

This is a great feature and works perfectly! The only possible thing that could improve it would be if we had a way to select a "sub-variant" based on what the user enters.

For example, a bottle of A Vitamins may be available in 100, 200 and 500 quantities for Brand "A" but brand "B" may only have 200 and 500 quantities. If we could have the variants set up as:

#1: Please select your brand name: <A> or <B>
#2: Please select your packaging size: <a> or <b> or <c>

Whereas the #2 variant could be setup based on the information determined by the first variant.

But you know what, I really like what is available now also! We are just adding a second product entry under the brand names instead.

In going back over the previous posts, I realized that I had not fully explored strapworks suggestion. In tinkering, what I found is that if I turn off advanced variants, I can set up the item to be $0.00 and in the regular variant have the correct prices in each variant (small, medium, and large). Then depending upon which variant is showing in the drop down box (based on sort order) depends upon which price is showing. Most importantly, it never shows $0.00. This is a step in the right direction.

I still need shipping weight to work so I still need advanced variants. Hopefully the trouble ticket I put in earlier today will get the techs looking at it. Based on what I found tonight there may be more of advanced variants not working than I wrote up.

Todd,

Are you using the advanced variants or the regular variants?

Thanks

Tom

Todd,

I think I understanding what you are saying... can you post an example?

Captain,

Lets say for an example that I have vitamins listed. I have vitamin-c tablets available from "sunshine" company and from "alpha" company. Both companies have the exact same product with the only difference being that "Sunshine" has them available in 100, 250 and 500 quantities while "Alpha" company has them available in only 100 and 500 quantities.

What I had meant for my earlier post to say was that it would be nice is there was a way that this could be done with 1 product entry and the use of variants to define the size of the bottle and the company.

That way, when a customer is ordering the "Sunshine" brand then the only allowable variants for that company would be the 100, 250 and 500. On the other hand, if they (the customer) chose to order the "Alpha" brand then only then 100 and 500 quanity variants would appear.

Does that make any sense? As I said, this is definately not a critical need, just a thought. The easy work around now is to just use a product entry for "Alpha Vitamin C" and one for "Sunshine Vitamin C" with the seperate allowable variants for each.

Todd-

That is a very good suggestion. The current way the variants are programmed into the software it's not something we can implement in the very near future. However, this has already been pointed out to the developers and is on their radar.

Yes... that makes perfect sense. Do you mind submitting that full example to mymonstercommerce feature submission. The new feature requests go right to our lead developer...

That I can do. Thanks guys! You're both great....actually, pretty much everyone at MC I have dealt with the great!

Glad to be of help Tom
I knew it would work for you, you and I are kind of in the same boat and sometimes it just takes some unique ideas to make our businesses work.
Todd - I think one option for you (until the option is added) is to offer multiple variants such as
Vitamin #1 (100 count bottle)
Vitamin #1 (200 count bottle)
Vitamin #1 (500 count bottle)
Its a lot to type in and offers a lot of variants and causes customers to think (when sometimes we want to think for them), but it solves your problem for the mean time.
Just a thought