Hi all,
well, I've taken some time to play around with Virtuemart 2 and I really like
many of the new features. Unfortunately, I'm not happy with the realisation
of variants (formerly called child products). I may have obverlooked or misunderstood
some of the features (yes, we definitely need a doku here!), but these are my first
impressions:
Let's take the T-Shirt example with size and color variations and stock control.
1. Backend:
As others have pointed out, the creation of products, child products (on 2 levels here) and establishing the
relations (size, color) in the parent products is very time consuming (more than it used to be in VM 1.1),
even if you use the clone function. If you have e.g. 5 sizes and 5 colors you end up with 31 (max.) different products
for 1 T-Shirt (including parents and children). If your shop contains e.g. 100 T-Shirts (which is not much for a realistic shop),
there might be as many as 3100 products (for T-Shirts). Apart from the time-consuming input it is hard
to find the products in the backend then, as they are all on the same level. There should be at least a sort of
tree representation instead of a flat list.
But, what's more important for me is the frontend, that is what the shoppers see:
2. Frontend
- Parent products can be added to the shopping cart: If the shopper finds a T-Shirt he would like to bye,
he might try to buy the parent product (which was not possible in VM 1.1). But what's the result of
bying a T-Shirt without color and size? There might be other products where it makes sense to bye parent
products, but I would like to have a choice in the backend for that.
- no drop-down lists for variants: I didn't find a possibility to present the child products as drop-down lists
(which are most common for attributes like size), only as links (how can you get rid of the image btw?).
So, if the customer detects the size variants he has to click on a link and a new page opens (or did I miss the AJAX?).
- shopper doesn't see what variants there are: Before he clicks on a size-variant, the shopper is not even aware that there
are any different colors for this T-shirt and again he has to click to finally reach the right T-Shirt.
- two many clicks: As many investigations show, the more a user has to click the more likely it is that he
aborts the process...
- stock of parents seems to be independant of the stock of the children (btw, although not enabled by me,
products that are out of stock are shown and can be added to the cart; also, stock is not reduced after sale)
So, as I have said before, I may have missed or misunderstood various things, but I really hope, that some
of the my points will be of some interest for the developpers.
Best regards
Petra