Shopsite 10 Pro & Stone Edge Order Manager Dilemma

[pacwest]

Hi Everyone,

We are in the process of building a store and came across this hurdle. Hoping you might be able to provide some suggestions and feedback on the best way to address it.

The store will be selling a bed that comes in 405 combinations (color, size, and additional enhancements). All combinations have their own sku and the price changes with every combination. We could build the selections using Shopsite's ordering options, but the price will not be appropriately applied in the cart. We could build all of the combinations as subproducts to a parent product, but listing a dropdown with 405 choices would be too cumbersome and not feasible. To the best of my knowledge, we cannot use Shopsite's Ordering Options when we are also using subproducts for a particular product.

It seems the solution is to create an API with a live MySQL database on the same server so that the Shopsite cart calculates and applies the purchased items appropriately. Here are my questions:

If we do this, will we have to abandon the use of Order Manager? Anyone out there knowledgeable on both softwares?

Can you think of any other effective work arounds? We don't want to abandon Order Manager or Shopsite 10 Pro.

I am very new to both softwares so your input (even if it seems small or potentially obvious) is greatly appreciated. I know this is not a unique issue, just one that is new to us.

All the best. Thank you for your time and insights.

Lynn

[dortchjm]

I'm using ShopSite Pro 10 and have purchased Order Manager, but haven't got it all hooked up yet. A test run seems to be working, I just need to customize my reports and make sure I really understand it before I turn it on.

I have products that have many colors, sizes and occassionally other options (such as embroidery, which is my next step to get figured out) and of course prices can vary with each combination. I'm using the order options for most of my products, which is fine if you only want to order one, or all the same color or same size, but is cumbersome when ordering multiple sizes for a group. I then tried the multi-add technique with subproducts suggested by ShopSite, it just didn't work for me, so now I'm coding each product combination individually, with individual prices, weights, etc. I'm using the same SKU for most, but you can use different ones as each item is treated as if it's own product, in fact, my youth sizes are a different SKU that appears on the invoice and in the cart. I'm coding each Name to be unique with all the options and the basic information needed make the cart and pricing work, then I have a main product that has just the basic name with all the stuff needed to create the web page. I do not link the subproducts to the main product, but manually code the form where items are added to the cart. I use one of the PRODUCT.Field's for this. I used a table to display my options. I'm using a custom template which I have modified from one of ShopSite's templates, but have adjusted it to fit my needs. To make the add form work without errors a little Javascript is needed, thanks to the LexiConn guys who helped me out here to get it to work perfectly. I've been working on this method for less than a month, so I'm learning as I go.

Here's a sample of one of my pages that has 367 products.

http://www.hickoryridgedesigns.com/asw-161.html

As far as Order Manager, I think it will end up working well for me as I have coded all the Names of my products in the same format that I currently manually type in the invoices for customers and purchase orders for my suppliers.

BTW, it's very time-consuming coding these pages, but my customers are using them, orders are coming in and the phone calls asking "me" to enter the orders have slowed down, so there is some benefit to it. But if anyone knows of an easier way, I'm willing to listen.

Janice Dortch
www.HickoryRidgeDesigns.com

[Barney Stone]

We could build the selections using Shopsite's ordering options, but the price will not be appropriately applied in the cart.

Do you know that the ShopSite order options can include price modifiers? If you can make them work for you, that might solve your problem. Details in the ShopSite KB at:

http://www.shopsite.com/help/8.0/en-US/ ... icing.html

[pacwest]

Thank you Janice for providing such a wonderful example and solution. Will need to consider your ideas further for implementation. Thank you so much. Good luck with all of your programming and much success to your new site.

Barney, thank you. Your solution just may work on some of our products, providing an easy solution in these cases. I really appreciate your feedback.

Additional solutions and brainstorming welcome from anyone who has the time to contribute. Thanks again!

Lynn