How to customize a product like Dell

[dbrennan44]

Guys - I'm new to Shopsite. How do I provide a set of customization categories for a product, similar to how Dell lets you customize a laptop before you buy it?

For example, they let you select a product (say an Inspiron), then give you a range of choices for processor, memory, hard drives, etc. How can Shopsite do this? Or rather, does Shopsite allow the customization required to do this?

Thanks,
Dan

[Jim]

I have seen some merchants use order options to do this. The computer is the main product and the various order options determine the disk, memory, keyboard, monitor etc. Using Order Option Pricing you can change the price for the total system based on the options selected.

You could also do it as a multi-product add to cart where you have the computer as one product and various other items as subproducts to that main one. The subproducts could have order options for selecting various features such as amount of RAM, Hard drive size etc. Using the multi-product layout each product would have a checkbox by the item and they would check the box for items they want to add to the cart. Once they have selected everything they want a single add to cart button put all items in the cart.

[dbrennan44]

Jim - Thanks.

The multi-product add seems to be the most flexible, allowing for pricing of sub-subcomponents. For example in the Dell example, allowing Inspiron's memory option to be 1GB RAM for $50. But like you said, it uses the checkbox. How can I enforce exclusion? In other words, I don't want them to select both 1GB RAM and 2GB RAM? It would seem a radio control wound force exclusion, but I don't see it.

Thanks,
Dan

[Jim]

For exclusion it would be better to use the Order Options which display in a pull down list. That way they can only have 1 selection.