Limit to number of sub-products?

[DavidM]

Is there a number limit to how many sub-products an item can have? I need to list several thousand parts. Other suggestions besides sub-products?

[Jim]

I don't think that there is a specific limit on the number of subproducts.

If I were a shopper though, and had to search through thousands of products on a single page I would probably give up. The load time for the page would probably be quite long.

Please explain more about the type of products you are selling as that may help with finding an appropriate way to organize them.

[DavidM]

I'll be selling pumps and all the parts that go with them.
Some brands have as many as 1000 variations of pumps. They are categorized and assigned to pages with sub products for the variations.
There are as many as 4000 parts for a brand. Eventually I will have exploded view pages with specific parts listed for a specific pump. That will take a long time to finish and not all parts I have available will be assigned to an exploded view page. Some parts are for discontinued pumps or are just informative (Jabsco 123 is replaced by Jabsco 456).
So what I'm looking for is a way to list all those parts for a particular brand so that they can be added to a cart. Then they will also be searchable on the site (and by Googe etc).
Sorry so long winded.
Thanks for your input.

[Jim]

Unless the product is indeed a subproduct of the main product I would just create each item as an individual product. The reason for this is that normally when a product is displayed on a page all of its subproducts are also displayed. It is possible to get around this by using a custom template but would make it a little harder to work with.

I would try to break things up into logical subunits and create pages for them so for example you have a main page for a particular pump. Then break the parts of that pump into sections like gaskets, bearings, housing parts, motor etc. Create a page for each of these section and then assign the various gaskets to the gasket page, bearings to the bearing page etc. That way the shopper can find the pump page and go to the page for the individual components of the pump to see items they are looking for.

[DavidM]

Ok, Thanks.
All the parts are already uploaded, just need a custom template to display them in a minimalistic way.