Attributes, Whats the best way to deal with them?

Attributes, Whats the best way to deal with them?


I have several items in the storefront that are the same, except for colors/sizes.

4-6 colors and 4+ sizes per color.

I hate having 12-24 items per 'real' item just to deal with colors and/or sizes.

While I can create a color and size attribute, I also need separate qty, size, sku and images per item.

I utilize Magnetic One's Zen Cart Store Manager for importing product (drop ship) feeds automatically
and I don't know how to get the best of both worlds, ie. automatic imports and a 'clean' store.

I am not sure even 'EZ Populate' will address my needs.
I know that it can address attributes, but the only real mod available is 'Stock by Attribute'
and that does not really address all of the issues as I would need to heavily/manually modify the csv files I need to import daily for stock quantities.

I do have Numinix product fields installed, and that gives ~parts~ of what I need, but how to import datafeeds while including attributes.

Of the 50k items, I think that ~60% are variations of the same product. I would like to reduce the comp############ and 'clutter' of having so many product variants, but do not want to lose the ability to import as frequently as needed to maintain stock levels, etc.

What am I missing?

I feel I need to explain this post a bit more.

Lets say I have a store full of pants.


I want a single 'product' that has the following attributes:
Name: Some Style of Pants
Size: S-XXL
Color: Red, Blue, Black, White

Images for each color, SKU for each combination(as they are separate products) and quantity for each SKU.

There really doesn't appear to be a great way to handle this in Zen Cart, especially for batch importing from other systems where quantity changes outside of zen cart (drop ship feed, POS system, multi-location storefronts, etc.

I realize this is a lot of possible combinations, but this is not unheard of when shopping online at just about any e-tailer nowadays.

Losing Product Numbers/SKUs the minute I 'combine' products seems like an administrative nightmare.

Or is the best way to just keep each as a separate product as it is and deal with duplicate data/text?