The old attributes/weight problem

[stehodges]

I am working on an ecommerce site for a food company, whose products are mainly sold in weight.

Most are sold in set weight packages (100g) and have fixed prices.
However, this brings up a few issues.

1. They also sell sample packages for a low price. I dont want to do two separate products for each sample/standard as it will clog up the product listing. I have tried a few ways of using attributes for this - firstly there is no way of seeing a sample version is available from the product page (can i dynamically add an icon next to the product names with samples available?) and secondly its strange the way each price is calculated as "-£15 for sample" etc. Setting a product as "starting from £0" is not great because it is then listed in the product listing as having the lower price. (and in info as "+£3" for example - cant it calculate the actual price?)

2. If someone orders 5x100g there is a %discount - where can i set this up?

Ideally it would be great if the customer could type in a weight and the cart would calculate exactly how much this would be (taking into account % off, if over set amount) - i cannot see any way of this being done however.

Id appreciate any pointers

[kobra]

1. set this up similar to this:

Product XXXX
sizes= sample.100g, 250g(you set aattribute name=size or? and attribute values associated with this name as sample, 100g, 250g etc)

As one should not be able to purchase more than one sample, you can set a one-time discount from the standard cost. Say the 250g is 220% of the 100g cost that is set in the price factor & offset area.

2. There is a quantity price discount section under the catalog tab and this displays differently and migh suit you purposes better.

Ideally it would be great if the customer could type in a weight and the cart would calculate exactly how much this would be (taking into account % off, if over set amount) - i cannot see any way of this being done however.

For this, one could establish the product in grams as the unit, set the minium purchase say to 100 and the increment to 100 so that one could not buy 115g. and using the attributes you could increment the price per gram or in this case per 100g

These relationships can be set and provide a robust set of pricing options but are not fully apparent not intuitive. Get the attrib names set and link to attrib values first then experiment with costing options.

[stehodges]

Thanks for the reply.

Re 1: This is how i have the weights setup at the moment, but it causes a couple of problems.
One is the fact that sample packet price reads +£2.75 and 100g reads, say, +£17 which is rather confusing.
Secondly, its also rather confusing selecting 100g, then choosing a quantity of, say, 4 if you required 400g. Is there no way of allowing customers to enter weight in a textfield, or a dropdown of 100 increments. (the problem with this is that in theory there is no limit)

Re 2: Im not sure i can set the quantity to use grams throughout as some products are accessories and simpyl need a quantity of 1/2/3 etc. Unless it can be changed dependent on the category?

[kobra]

Is there no way of allowing customers to enter weight in a textfield, or a dropdown of 100 increments.

You could create attribute names of 100g, 200g, etc. I have used similar settings for a product where there is an item then it is available by the box or case. Box or case is in a dropdown. you would have the 100,200, etc in the drop down.

Im not sure i can set the quantity to use grams throughout as some products are accessories and simpyl need a quantity of 1/2/3 etc. Unless it can be changed dependent on the category?

Grams would be an attribute that can or not be associated with one or many products. You should set this up and experiment so that you can see the relationships.

[stehodges]

thanks - i will give these a try.

Any ideas how, when using priced by attributes, i can show in the dropdown/radio etc the actual price of each size rather than a +£amount from the base price

[kobra]

I also attempted to do this on a site where it was listed as a single with the single price but only sold by the box or case.

The manner that attributes are calculated and their original intention prevented this. The intention is to allow options to be added to the base price thus the + values.

The best I could do was to omit the + value and only list box & case in the dropdown with no price until it was added to the cart. There apparently is no work around for this other than listing the qty pricing in the description but that defeats or complicates maintenance if the price changes. One would have to also change the description text also.

[stehodges]

surely i can hack at the code for the dropdown, and remove refences to price offset and weight offset which i have added