Products with dozens of variants - best practice?

[loopy-vm]

Hi,

I'm setting up a shop with articles having dozens of variants. E..g jackets with different sizes  (44, 46, 48, and so on). I can solve that with a custom field (type "string") defined as a list. But now here's my problem. Each variant has a different variant number within our ERP system. So I need to pass this information to the order but the customer should not see it.

At the moment my custom field for sizes looks like that: 48 (34577), 50 (34578), ...
Is there a better way to solve this (before we start entering the data)?

Thanks,

[Jörgen]

Welcome to the forum

Please read this:

http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=79799.0


If You have stock for the jackets, which i assume it would be better to use Child Products. You can add customfields that only show up in the cart. And You could add som CSS to hide the value in the customer views.

regards

Jörgen @ Kreativ Fotografi

[Studio 42]

Hi,
You have some solutions.
Use multi variant and do 1 product per variant, but this need 1 child product per variant as Jorgen explained .
Another solution is to check with a developer to do a customfield plugin so you can overide all renders(in backen too) and have more possibility if needed.
To import your products, you can do it with my tool Vm Be pro, excluding if you use multi variant, you have then to add each variant manually.
You can contact me, if you need some advise.
Regards,
Patrick

[loopy-vm]

At the moment I'm solving it like that:

1 Product category (clothes)
1 Product for all variants
1 Custom field for each product defined as list, e.g: 

S (34400);L (34398);M (34399);XL (34401);XXL (34402);XXXL (34403)

Each custom field has a name combined with the product, e.g: COM_VIRTUEMART_ART_BEST_GROESSE_HD_POLO_DAMEN_3HAK22429
This field I translate with the joomla language manager (overrides).
For the moment this is working for me, but time and (hopefully) more experince soon with the system will show if that is a good way.

@Jörgen:
Sorry, my configuration: Virtuemart 3.2.4, PHP-Version: 5.6.31, Joomla 3.8.1

@Studio42:
Thanks for your answer. I will also check your tool VM Be pro, I'm pretty sure we will soon offer much more products on the shop. At the moment it's just a test for maybe 2 dozen products and so we enter them manually.


regards,
sven

[balai]

If you want to create different product variations (i.e. child products) from custom fields, check also the Stockable Custom Fields plugin
https://breakdesigns.net/extensions/joomla/stockable-custom-fields

It will give you some benefits over the multi-variants.
The direct connection of a variant with a combination of custom fields (i.e. attributes)
The upload of an image and set of other characteristics (sku, name, price) when you create it