Hello Zen Cart world! A recent Craigslist hire has put my store and gig in jeopardy and I really need some creative guidance here:

I have a ZenCart store that sells hair extensions. Every single color and style of hair has it's own product number. We can't do anything to change the product numbers because they are synced with the fulfillment center already.

The way I had previously had the system set up: every product number in ZenCart was an individual product. This worked perfectly with the integration of both Quickbooks and the Fulfillment center, but the client came back and demanded that customers be able to select the color from a drop-down menu instead of listing all the individual colors as individual products.

So I hired a so-called ZenCart expert to help with the issue and he convinced me that if he set up product attributes with the product number suffix and made the parent product's model number just the prefix - that he'd be able to map all the combos to their prospective products for the syncs.

Well, we implemented his solution (and I had to help cause we were on a deadline and he wasn't moving fast enough). Turned out we missed the deadline and I paid the guy for all the work he did and he assured me everything was set up correctly. I couldn't test because I'm usually not at the client's computer. After the missed deadline, we put off the project for a couple of months until my client could come up with funds to keep development going.

Fast-forward to last night. After everything was successfully set up, the store won't sync to either because the product numbers aren't mapping and transferring with the attributes in-tact. Webgility ECC doesn't even recognize product attributes.

So here's my question: is there some creative way that I could bypass actual product pages and have users select the product they want through a drop-down menu on an EZ page or something?

I'm not really seeing any solution to this issue that can be fixed with the current set-up. I think attributes are dead to me, now. Any help or brainstorming would be greatly appreciated. I would hire another guy, but there is no more budget for help. It's just me and I.

If y'all are interested in taking a look at the store - you can visit it by going to http://nordichaircontrast.com

Thanks so much for your time and I hope to hear from some of you, soon!

-Nabil