Product Config advice - complex product options

[Marked13]

Hi guys

We've been racking our brains the last couple of days about how to do the setup we're trying to acheive. We've got a client who sells artworks and each product requires several selectable options. We're upgrading from a custom ecommerce store we did to Magento.

Here's the mockup of our product page options

Our first thought was configurable products. However, there's just too many options. The sheer number of variations/simple products that would be required for configurable products would be in the hundreds of thoustands so isn't a viable option.

Here's how this form works:

• Print type: either canvas or paper
• Print Size: a range of sizes which different depending on print type
• A frame type - just a simple option
• Frame colours - avaliable colours depend on each different frame type
• And lastly, if frame type was mattboard, a mattboard colour option needs to be avaliable

So we have two main goals:

• Product options that change depending on other product options
• Reducing amount of data entry (eg the smallest possible combination of products that can acheive this result per main product).

Thanks in advance!

Mark

[gray_dog]

I have the same problem and never really found anything that would work better than configurable products. I wrote a script that generates all the simple products programmatically. The down side is that whenever the options need to change I usually delete everything and recreate them all by re-running the script the new options. It creates hundreds of thousands of products and takes a long time to run since Magento is painfully slow when it comes to programmatically creating products.

I would love it if there was a "custom product" or "product builder" feature in Magento for products that have many options where the administrator does not need to manage an inventory.