How to approach heavily customizable products

[eheitman]

I'm new to developing in Magento and my company sells products that are heavily customizable, and I'm trying to get an idea on where to start with implementing our products into a Magento site. I would appreciate any advice on how to implement this or any resources/modules that you can point me to.

If I were to try and create a simple product for every combination they would number in the millions. Currently, the most straightforward way I can think of is to create simple products with custom options rather than using the attributes system. However, the custom options don't have the flexibility in pricing that we need (quantity discounts and customer groups).

Here is an example of my company's current product order page: https://plastekcards.com/order-cards/?product=gM5MTM

[iweb_smartie · Accepted solution]

Hi there.

It really comes down to stock control. If you need to manage stock for each combination then you will need to create each product as a simple and then group them in a configurable. If this is not the case then simples with custom options is absolutely fine and i would suggest doing it that way.

Configurables are great but they do carry more overhead than simples.

Regards,

Andy

[eheitman]

Thanks for the advice.

It seems like the best route for me is to create simples with custom options, although it will probably involve custom programming. 

I do need to keep track of inventory, but only at a certain level. For example, if I have ProductX in 20 different colors, I need to track the inventory of ProductX rather than each of the 20 colors of ProductX. This is because it's one stock item that is customized on request.

I did some napkin-math on how many simple products I would have to make if I went with configurables and it came out to over 300 million. I don't even want to think about taking that project on.