Advance Order Options Improvements

[specialtygraphics]

I just went through the long task of switching over all our products with Basic Options to Advanced Options and was excited to have the new functionality of alternate skus and inventory tracking on options. However, I then went through a couple of days of frustration trying to make everything work and realizing it is due to the lack of functionality of the cart. We had several customers confused over how the appended text displays on drop downs. Then I had to redo a couple of them completely because there were more options that needed to be ordered in a certain way. Then worst of all a couple of our customers carts got locked up due to them adding items that were out of stock to their carts. They received a notice it was out of stock and when they removed it the cart acted as if it was still there.

It is great that each item has its own sku and inventory tracking but there is much room for improvement on the whole functionality of the options.

First off, the appended text field. The text only appears on the last drop down of the group. It would be great to be able to append text to each option if necessary.

Second, adding items in a specific order. We usually alphabetize our drop downs for selecting colors. When a new color is added it becomes a pain to have to to add it. We either have to break from our set up way of doing the drop down or redo the entire Advanced Option. The ability to sort the options after they have all been made would make this easier.

Finally, there is a great feature with the cart that allows you to set the option to gray out and append text to the entire option if the inventory reaches the out of stock limit. However ShopSite only queries the inventory when there are 2 or more columns because the inventory is checked after the first selection is made. There is no inventory check performed when there is just 1 drop-down. The whole feature really is useless unless it functions with all items that use cascading menus. The check is done through javascript using an onchange function why not do a similar call onload though. Yes it would take an extra second or two to load the page but honestly for a great feature such as this it really is worth it.

I believe that everything we have for the Advanced options so far is great and with a few modifications it would make it a far more usable feature for everyone.