Detailed stock control

[alan@onlybowls.]

I'm struggling a little with the finer points of stock control and hope there's a relatively easy answer.

Say I'm selling a bath towel, in pink, green and white. I have a product 'bath towel' with a colour attribute, with three choices. From an order processing and website viewpoint, that's fine. The product displays to the customer, with a pulldown for the attribute and I get told which attribute they've selected on the order.

But it's not quite good enough from a stock control viewpoint, because all I can keep track of are how many bath towels I have in stock, not how many bath towels of each colour.

I don't really want a different product code for each colour, but I am concluding that I might have to.

What are the possible approaches I could take to monitoring stock at the lowest level - in the example here, by colour?

Thanks in advance,

Alan

[TraceyG]

Hi,

I'm afraid that you will have to have a different product code for each choice if you monitor stock on them. Basically, you would have to:

- create a product (i.e Bath Towel), then create a componant, attribute and your choices (colours) coming off that product. You can find instructions on how to do this in the Help Files if you search for 'component'.

Then once you have done this, you would need to right click 'bath towel' and create a new product for each colour, ie Bath Towel - Red, Bath Towel - Blue etc (the reason for doing this is that this is where the stock monitoring is held for each colour).

Then, within each one of these 'colour' products that you have just created, if you go into each one, and Check Hide On Website under the general tab, and also set the relevant stock level for each size under the Stock tab.

Once you have done this, then go into the componant you created coming off the 'bath towel' product, and go to the Permutations tab.

For each choice you have entered in the list, if you scroll to the right there is a column titled Product - if you select the relevant 'Colour' Product from the dropdown list to associate it with the 'Colour' Choice, then you will be able to apply stock monitoring to each colour on your site.

[alan@onlybowls.]

Thanks - that's pretty much the conclusion I had come to.

It does seem a bit of a long winded way of achieving something that is relatively common. It obviously works, but it just seems a bit inelegant.

When I add the component, can I set something somewhere so that the product I am adding the component to defaults to 'Product pricing' instead of one of the others?

Alan

[djferros]

same for me..

...just takes too long. Very strange and it would seem common sense to design the package to take this into account.

[Froogle]

...just takes too long. Very strange and it would seem common sense to design the package to take this into account.

there are quite a few as you put it 'common sense' things which should have been added into the program, especially seen as we are on revision 7

it really is a wonderful program but there are some basic underlying things which I am surprised have not been changed yet.

[TraceyG]

Hi,

can I set something somewhere so that the product I am adding the component to defaults to 'Product pricing' instead of one of the others?

Yes, on the main product 'General' tab, make sure that the 'Pricing Model' is set to 'Product Price'.