Stock control and replacements parts/consumables

[Greenmind]

Say you sell gizmos, and every gizmo comes with a widget. So your product is a gizmo/widget combo. But you also sell replacement widgets for your gizmo because the widgets are consumables. Now I want to monitor stock of my gizmos and my widgets. That means every time I sell a gizmo/widget combo it must be reflected in my stock of widgets.

I could stop selling the gizmo/widget combo, and leave the product as a gizmo only, and point out to the customer that he will also need to buy a widget to go with it, dropping the price of the gizmo accordingly, but I'd rather not as the gizmo without the widget is effectively useless. Is there another way?

[Mike Hughes]

Make the Widget a non-optional component of the gizmo/widget combo and associate the actual widget with the component.

Simples.

Mike

[Greenmind]

Thanks Mike. Perhaps I should have mentioned that the gizmos come in various different sizes, and must be matched with the right sized widget.

Yes, your idea works with the gizmo as an individual product, but there are actually 10 or so products listed in the drop down if different sizes are taken as separate products i.e a gizmo size 1 and gizmo size 2 from a practical point of view are no different from a T-shirt and a saucepan, just that in the case of gizmos one photo and one description is all that's required for both, other than that they are completely different products.

Trying to get my head round it..

[Mike Hughes]

I've stopped using drop downs for this kind of thing and now use a product description, photo, etc at the top of the page and a single line layout for each of the products underneath. I like to do it this way as it's better for showing different prices, stock information, etc and allows me to include accessories, etc on the same page as well.

You can see an example here: http://www.firsttackle.co.uk/acatalo...-fly-reel.html

The only downside is that people have to scroll down the page to buy, but seeing how much information amazon put on a page these days I'm not sure if that's a problem or not.

Mike