Selling wheels, need tips on how to organize products

[shakudu]

I'm helping someone set up a wheel shop.

Ideally they want the customer to pick their ride like this:
Make -> Model -> Year -> Engine
and get a list of wheels that fit that particular car.

Each wheel can fit several models, and the whole car database is pretty large and changes yearly.

Any good ideas on how to best do this? I've tried looking for wheel-dealers using virtuemart but haven't found any god ones.
So it might be that virtuemart's not the best pick for this but i'll give it a try.

Something like this selector would be ideal http://www.tsw.com/fitment/?year=2009&make=Cadillac

[shakudu]

Ok, i've been givin this a lot of thought but my virtuemart skills are lacking
What i'd ultimately want would be something like this:

- Product with some kind of technical attributes (bolt , hub size and something more).

- Procuct categories that when navigated trough ends up listing wheels with matching attributes to the car model selected.

[PRO]

?

http://breakdesigns.net/extensions/custom-filters

[shakudu]

Close but not what i need.

Because the complexity of the products, what the customer needs to know is a handful of technical specifications.
But to simplify it for the customer, we allow them to select their vehicle. And ultimately, when they've selected make, model and so on the products matching those specifications are displayed.

An examle would be the customer selecting these options in the menu (either via categories or filters)
Acura -> Integra -> 92>

And this would display wheels matching the specifications of an -92 Integra: PCT: 4x100, Offset: 37-45 and Bore: 56.1.

If we get this to work we won't have to add every single product to every single matching car manually and since this is changing often it will save us of a LOT of maintenance.

[balai]

I think that custom filters can work this way.

The module returns the relative options after a selection. Also there is a setting named "display if exist" whith which you can set some filters to be displayed in specific row

The interesting fact, is how you think you will reduce the maintenance, i m not sure that i get that

[shakudu]

It will reduce maintenance because when we add a product we only input three technical specifications and the wheel is matched to car models automatically instead of us having to look it up and select every model it can fit.

It's what i'm hoping to archieve

[shakudu]

This guy explains it better but it does not look like he got an answer...
http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=94521.0

So i can't be the only one requesting a function like this?
I also tried e-mailing some people that actually makes related extensions but it seemed like they had no idea what i was talking about

[PolishedGeek]

We built this custom auto parts by model filtering system a while back for a client: http://automotivepart.com  (When trying this out, use any year other than 2013. He doesn't seem to have added any 2013 parts to the system.)
Is that type of filtering similar to what you have in mind? I'm sure we could build something like this in your VirtueMart store to work off of whatever specs you want to use for the tires.

Another approach to selling tires is to create a specialized component.  We're working currently with another web dev company that supports a large tire distributor in Canada. The other dev company built a custom component to store and search the tire information. We are being asked to integrate the tire component with eCommerce features for retail customers in early 2014. Probably won't be VM2, though. Looking at something that has full multi-vendor eCommerce capabilities. There are many franchises using the tire component, who all sell in different regions, with different pricing, etc.

Either way, both of these approaches are custom solutions that cost quite a bit of money to build. Unfortunately I'm not aware of an "off the shelf" inexpensive solution that handles all the requirements for tire sales in VM2 or any other Joomla eCommerce cart.