Not sure how to accurately describe this, but I will give it my best shot.
I am helping a friend set up a website with a shop. He is an older gentleman, and his customers will all also be older gentlemen. He would prefer that his shop look as much like an old-school paper catalog as possible. He wants the main page of the shop to show all categories, with all items in each category as a list indented beneath the category heading. When you click on a sinle item, if it has variations or options, instead of drop downs or radio buttons, he wants the variants to all be listed beneath the item's description and images, allowing the shopper to add more than one variant to the cart from that same page.
As an example, say he was selling clothes, it might look like this;
(Main Page)
Clothes
...Logo Shirts
...Colored Shirts
...Hoodies
...Hats
...Sweat Pants
...Shoes
...Aprons
...Something Else
...And So On
And then, when someone clicks on 'Hoodies', the page will look like this;
HOODIES
(picture + description)
Small Blue Hoodie ($25.00) [__]
Small Red Hoodie ($25.00) [__]
Small Green Hoodie ($25.00) [__]
Small Red Hoodie ($25.00) [__]
Medium Blue Hoodie ($27.00) [__]
Medium Red Hoodie ($27.00) [__]
Medium Green Hoodie ($27.00) [__]
Medium Red Hoodie ($27.00) [__]
Large Blue Hoodie ($32.00) [__]
Large Red Hoodie ($30.00) [__]
Large Green Hoodie ($32.00) [__]
Large Red Hoodie ($30.00) [__]
XL Black Hoodie ($45.00) [__]
(Add to Cart)
where [__] are quantity fields, and (Add to Cart) is a button adding all quantities to the cart at once.
Again, not sure that I explained that right, and I do realize it seems unwieldy and inelegant (at least to me) - but that is how he wants it to look/work. Is that possible with Virtuemart?
VirtueMart is an open source project, so you can do pretty well anything to use it in setting up a store. Whether you can achieve a store as described is obviously dependent on your programming & design skills level, in particular the product list with one add to cart, although something like Product Builder would give you a step in that direction.
Well, my query was more to the effect of, can it readily be done with the existing shop modules and stable 3rd party addons. With strong enough programming and design level skills, anything can be done with any plugin (or without a plugin), of course.