Product has different suppliers and different costs. How to manage them?

[cobra-arbok]

I'm new to VirtueMart. I just installed the latest version in Joomla (latest version) and I'm doing some testing.

Many products come from different suppliers and therefore have different costs, or different VAT or even different shipping costs.
I see that for each product I can enter multiple suppliers (manufacturers), but if I'm not mistaken I can't enter different costs.
I could use different SKUs, but they would always be for the same product.

How can I manage them?

[jenkinhill]

Each item would be a product in its own right. To tie them together use a parent product (not for sale / unpublished?) and then child products of that for each manufacturer. Never tried it and sounds like a lot of work!

[Jörgen]

??

How do you you know how much the product did cost you when they are marked with the same SKU and have the same design ?
In my view is this impossible to know what item should have which price.

Either you manage them as seperate products with separate prices and separate stock, if this is what you want, or you simply adjust the prices for all
of the sme products in stock, up or down, depending on the purchase price and nr of items in stock.

Jörgen @ Kreativ Fotografi

[cobra-arbok]

As I said at the beginning, I'm new to VM and was doing some testing.

From what I understand, there are various ways to classify a product here, but not even one to define its costs exactly, starting from the costs related to the supplier's purchase.
Entering a default cost is completely arbitrary and incorrect from an accounting point of view.

In many businesses, you buy the same product from multiple suppliers with different costs.
The example that everyone can understand is the PC, the mouse, the printer; but it is an example that applies to many other products, including non-ICT ones.

[Ghost]

There is no concept of suppliers in VM. You can define multiple prices but you can't tie them to a stock. Would be a nice feature but I don't expect it to be implemented. As others have said, you can use child products to have the same product with separate price AND stock. It's not very customer friendly but I've seen this used in the wild.