Configurable Product In Bundle

[dndan]

I'm really interested in the ability to have configurable products as part of bundles. I've found one extensoin that claims to do this by Wizkunde, but reviews are mixed and I've tried to e-mail them twice with no response. That doesn't instill a lot of confidence in me, and I don't look forward to trying to convince my boss to shell out for it when we can't test it or confirm it will actually do what we want - they advertise a 14 day money back guarantee but if we can't actually contact them there's no reason to believe that can or will be honored if it won't do what we need or work for us! Everything else that comes up in my google-fu is largely people looking for this functionality or complaining that they contacted developers looking for it but it was prohibitively expensive - nothing helpful.

Has anyone used the Wizkunde Configurable Bundle extension and would be willing to answer some questions about it? Perhaps you're using it in a live environment somewhere I could see?

Alternatively, is there any other way to get this functionality that I may have overlooked?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

[robtull]

Here at Classy Llama we spent a pretty significant amount of time trying to do this and finally determined it wasn't practically feasible. If someone were to request something like this today, we would recommend building a custom Magento product type instead of trying to force configurables to work within the bundle context. It just doesn't work out very well.

[dndan]

I'm not familiar with what is involved in the creation of custom product types or how labor-intensive of a project that would be. Is this the kind of thing that would take an experienced developer a few hours, days, weeks? Or is it too heavily dependent on the specific details of the implementation and requirements to estimate without more details?

This functionality would be massively helpful to us but I'm not sure how much of a budget I can get approval to secure - I'd like to see if this is even remotely feasible for us to implement.

[robtull]

What exactly are you trying to achieve? You can already do dropdown based options with the native bundle construct. Is it the need to have multiple dropdowns driving a single SKU selection?

[Theis Corfixen]

Hi dndan

I will agree with robtull, that doing configurable products within bundled products properly shouldn't be attempted. With configurable products you will always end up with a single Simple product in your shopping card. These simple products can be added as a bundle item, within its own option, and then its only a question of corrently naming your products. 

If you have a lot of new products constantly comming into your store, and your operating budget isn't high enough to maintain this. Any Magento developer should be able to automate this feature for you :-)

[magextensions]

We have the same problem at the moment, after a massive search there is no extension that can solve this. We are in the process of creating a solution with indeed a new product type that will fix this. In our case the problem is that one product could exist out of multiple parts with all their own stock, but this should not be visible for the customer. 

[dndan]

>What exactly are you trying to achieve?

Here's a concrete example. One of our flagship products is a bundle where each bundle option is a component of the kit. One of these options has five products to choose from. Easy, right? Except each of those products is a configurable product, four of which are configurable on two attributes. The total number of permutations for all 5 configurables is 44 simple products - a completely unwieldly listing if I was to simply use them all, regardless of how they are named!

The available choices do need to be filtered based on what is actually in stock - each of these 44 child products is a completely different real object, and when any individual sku is out of stock it can sometimes take weeks to get more.

In a perfect world, the customer would see just five choices - and then when they select one, the configurable attributes for that selection would appear with it. Right now, unless I'm missing something, I have to either give our customers 44 choices when 5 will do or work out a hacky solution with dependent custom options that doesn't look great and is completely non-functional for inventory control and tracking.

[robtull]

Based on what you're describing, it sounds (unfortunately) like a custom product type is the solution for you. That will take some development to accomplish - something I don't have the chops to provide guidance for. However, doing asking in the programming section here or over on the Magento StackExchange could probably provide you with some useful guidance.

Best of luck!

[Pektsekye]

Hello,

One of the hacky solutions is to add 44 choices to one bundle option.

Then use custom JavaScript code to hide real drop-down select and display two drop-downs instead of it.

If 44 products have detailed titles like:

Red_XL_product _name

Red_XXL_product_name

Blue_XL_product_name

First drop-down will use available color names of the 44 product titles.

Second drop-down will use available sizes of the 44 product titles.

After selecting color: Blue and single available size for blue color: XL JavaScript code will select correct value from 44 in the hidden drop-down.

So that it will look like "configurable attributes" for customer and will have correct inventory control and tracking for store owner.

Stanislav

[Wizkunde]

I'm the owner of Wizkunde. Just to show you that it's possible, you can see demos of it here:

Magento 1: https://magento.wizdemo.nl/a-full-clothing-set.html

Magento 2: https://m2.wizdemo.nl/balistico-2-0-with-rashguard.html

(extensions are on our website)