Components, permutations, options.........

[Air-Tech]

I've had a look at Actinic help, but I'm still unsure about this;

I have some products which as well as selling in their own right, I would also like to sell as part of "kits" containing multiple products, I would like these kits to appear the same to the end user as any other product on the site, without the need for drop downs, choices or additions.

These kits in reality would have no stock, their existence being dependant on the stock of their component parts & any sale of a kit would reduce the stock quantity of each component used, the kits would also display as in or out of stock dependant on the stock levels of their components.

I already do the same thing with a few items, but it's currently reliant on double stocking or manually altering stock qty's every time a kit is sold - I had though that the "component" option would automate this, but it doesn't look like it.

Is this something that is feasible with Actinic "out of the box"?


Thanks.

[malbro]

I've had a look at Actinic help, but I'm still unsure about this;

I have some products which as well as selling in their own right, I would also like to sell as part of "kits" containing multiple products, I would like these kits to appear the same to the end user as any other product on the site, without the need for drop downs, choices or additions.

These kits in reality would have no stock, their existence being dependant on the stock of their component parts & any sale of a kit would reduce the stock quantity of each component used, the kits would also display as in or out of stock dependant on the stock levels of their components.

I already do the same thing with a few items, but it's currently reliant on double stocking or manually altering stock qty's every time a kit is sold - I had though that the "component" option would automate this, but it doesn't look like it.

Is this something that is feasible with Actinic "out of the box"?


Thanks.

Actinic will control the purchase of the kits from the stock levels of components but you can't use that information to directly display the stock level or control the add to cart button. If you try to buy a product made up from components then after you click the add to cart button Actinic will display an error message if one of the constituent products is out of stock, this is handled in the cart and purchase Perl scripts running on the host. The real-time stock control system that controls the on screen messages and the add to cart button visibility is handled in the browser and uses AJAX techniques to get the current stock level of a product from the host scripts.

The stock control code that handles real-time stock messaging on the screen works from the individual stock levels of products, a kit made up from individual products will not have a stock level that Actinic code can access, unless you manually set the stock level as you have sussed out. This leads to duplicated stock levels and sales of the component product do not affect stock levels of the kit.

Technically it is possible to access the stock levels of all the items that make up a kit and custom code could keep a real-time value on the screen and control the buying process as the existing real-time system does. However it would need to take a number of factors into account including the quantity of each individual product that makes up the kit and the stock levels of each of those products.

[Air-Tech]

Thanks for you concise reply Malcolm!

I was coming to the conclusion that it wasn't a feature as such, but wasn't certain - looks like I'll be sticking to double stocking or quantity tinkering for the meantime & have a more serious look at it further down the line.

[NormanRouxel]

See http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=52275 where someone wanted to display an Associated Products's reference on the Component.

AssociatedProduct::StockLevel may be of use to you.

I didn't mention this earlier as you asked for "out of the box".

[I-CC]

AssociatedProduct::StockLevel is great for at the point of upload stock position, but the site will remain displaying that stock position within the component no matter how many have been sold until the next upload is conducted is my understanding, so any use should be tempered with some message along the lines of 'Stock status correct as 24hrs' or similar depending on how often you upload I guess.