Prohibiting certain items in combination from shopping basket?

[BetterChem]

Hi Everybody

I'm an employee within a small online business that deals with Pharmaceutical products. I've been assigned a large amount of tasks within this business and am fairly new to Magento (although our company has been up and running with it for a few years).

Unfortunately I don't have much coding experience, and I apologize if there was a more appropriate section of the Magento Forums to submit this to, I am however a little bit desperate and would really appreciate if someone could help me here. I am currently working this position due to lack of staff - I'm sure my manager would have acquired someone more fitting for the role, had they been available, but I'm just trying to help him out.

We have recently been prohibited from dispatching multiple packs of a certain type of product within the same order. I.e, we are no longer allowed to send multiple boxes of Nurofen (of any pack size) per order. (customers are allowed to place separate orders each containing 1 pack).

Nurofen comes in 3 pack sizes (32, 24 and 12). I have managed to reduce the maximum quantity of all sizes in the basket to 1 using Magentos back end functions, but of course customers are now placing orders for 1 pack of 32, and 1 pack of 24 etc.

Is there any way I can set up the website to not allow any more than 1 pack of Nurofen in the basket per order? I understand that this may likely require coding and if that is the case I am sure I can hire someone with the experience to set this up for me, I just want to know where my first point of action is.

Thank you very much for reading - any input would be hugely appreciated.

[akent99]

Very sorry it took me so long to get back. I missed this one! I have not personally tried some of the more advanced options personally, so appologize is more some suggestions to explore rather than direct answers.

One option is to explore using configurable products. Behind the scenes configurable products create one simple product per SKU, but the "configurable product" allows them to be grouped. Normally used for "size" or "color" - instead you could create one for "quantity". There are also options to select what appears in the indexes - you might need to make the "configurable product" not indexed, and the individual simple products indexed (which might not be the default settings). That is, it might take some fiddling to see if this will work for you.

My main fear is other parts of the experience may get messed up by introducing the configurable product, just for the purpose of restricting things.

I was trying to work out if some form of pricing rule (normally for giving discounts) could reject the cart. I doubt it, but it was another random thought. (I will ask some people internally for other clever ideas.)

The cleanest solution I suspect is to get a new module created for doing this - it can come up with appropriate messages explaining why the constraint exists etc. But that would require a developer to build as you say.

And very sorry again for missing this one before!