Multiple Attributes and Pricing

I am evaluating whether or not we can use Zen-Cart for our application. I have done a lot of searching through this help forum and I am still unclear as to the status and/or capability of the "stock by attribute" update (or feature, or add-on??).

I have many products that are defined in my Point of Sale system (QB POS) on a two-dimensional "style" grid. For example, I have a paint product that comes in three sheens (flat, gloss, and satin) and in three sizes (qt,gal,5gal). For my web store I only want to have one item and then have two drop-down menus where the customer can pick the sheen and size. But the actual price will depend on the particular combination of sheen and size chosen. Is this possible with your product? If so, can you please provide a text example?

Furthermore, I need to have the ability to do this via importing a text file of some sort into Zen-Cart. Since we currently have a "brick-and-mortar" retail store I will frequently be making changes within our POS system and will then need to import those changes over to our web store. We will be able to write our own parsing and data manipulation programs to "massage" our POS data to whatever format we need for Zen-Cart...if Zen-Cart has that capability.

I am not interested in having multiple web items to meet this need. I understand that I could have one item called "Paint - Flat", one called "Paint - Gloss", and one item called "Paint - Satin" and each item having the three sizes as options but that will mean vastly increasing the number of items that I manage on your database and more importantly - it will destroy the ability to have a "simple" interface for customers.

Please go to: http://www.yourgreenhome.com/test/pulldown.html for an example of the pull-down strategy I am describing.

Thank You in advance for any assistance.

David

I'm a newbie too, but I'm interested in the solution for this as I may have some similar applications. Can you post an example of your "grid" from excel so we can get a better idea?

You might look at the attributes ...

With those you can have a base price and then build in the additional charges based on attributes ...

You might wish to install a test directory with a test database and the demo products to see how attributes are used to affect the prices of products to get a better understanding of the flexibility available to you ...