Choosing right solution for adding products

[ebmaurer]

Hi,

I am trying to find the right and also quickest solution of adding products which consists of:



Example:

1 sofa --> 10 different possibilities of configuration (Configurable product I guess)

But then each can be choosen in 4 different types of material and each material has about 20-40 different colours/patterns.



Which is the best way of setting up this type of product, using a way to choose colour for each material through showing colour/pattern samples in thumbnail style? I read about colour swatches but do I need to add each possibility of configuration with each colour/pattern? As this would make about up to 800 possibilities ;(



Thanks for each help you can give me.

[CreativeWest]

You are probably better with custom options however you have no inventory control, configurables will require the combinations and that is a disaster from maintenance and also site performance in your case.

[ebmaurer]

Hi,

inventory is not really important as 99% of products are "custom" ordered and not in stock.

I have seen "Custom options" but doesn't give the option to show the options as thumbs or so instead of drop down window.

Is there no other way, buy add-on or so as if not, i will have to add around 500 lines of product just for one sofa, and we have many ;(

Any way to have an option been able to be attributed to a batch of products in one go?

[CreativeWest]

There is an extension floating around that allows images on custom options, advanced options believe but cannot comment on quality or suitability. For the options every color will be available for every type, if you need selective combinations then it needs to be configurables. For creating the simple products via a configurable you ideally need a external tool, there are various available but we use an Excel based one or a more advanced version that auto-syncs from a pim. In any case you need some pretty advanced hosting, Magento with 300-500 or 700-1,000 simples per configurable is not going to be something you average hosting can handle, again we use some specialist solution for this type of thing but you need 1-2s page loads and that is always the issue with that many combinations.