Stock by Attribute (or Attribute Combo)

[richardj]

Hi all, firstly I'm just going to say that I've read the other threads in this section that concern this issue, and I'm aware that some functionality changes in this area are coming in the next release.

I work for a UK software house specialising in supply-chain software for the clothing and footwear market, (so fairly niche in terms of product portfolio).
We ONLY sell to companies in this market.

We have a need to add an eCommerce option to our product line, and we are currently evaluating ZenCart as a possible basis for this.

The flexibility of the product is very nice, and I have now built most of the mapping in our extract routines to cross-reference our database product tables to the the ZenCart tables, but there are some additional areas of functionality that we need.

We've created the Product table for a particular style (eg, T shirt) and added in Product_Attributes for the Color, Size and Fit of the T shirt, which works very well. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to show, or at least reference, inventory of a product's attributes, only of the product as a whole. So we may
have 50 T shirts in stock, but none of the Red/Large ones, and no obvious way to inform the customer of this. Lots of clothing industry customers will have this or similar issues, I feel.

So, we have a few questions:

1) are there any ZenCart users out there that have resolved a similar situation - if so, how (without treating each Style/Color/Size as a separate Product, or creating "compound" attributes) ?

2) we have relatively low PHP/MySQL skills , if the functionality had to be added, what's a rough estimate in terms of time and cost for the change ?
We're happy for the changes to go into base functionality so that all users benefit.

3) when's the next release due ?

Thanks for your time

Cheers,
Richard

[kobra]

As you have read, this is being developed by the ZenCart team. It is not an easy fix if you consider that ZenCart is designed for many types of products.

Think about a situation where there are shirts long & short sleve. five colors and 5 sizes. this is a matrix of 2 x 5 x5 or 50 or stock items.

Just to illustrate the complexity of what this requires.

[richardj]

Oh, I'm fully aware of the complexity. Like I said in my initial post, I work for a company that only sells database solutions to clothing and footwear companies,
so I've spent the last 15 years optimising grids and matrices for colour/fit/size combinations. For a business-to-business (B2B) situation, which is our main situation, this is fairly standard stuff - it's different for business-to-consumer (B2C) where the end user typically doesn't buy a range of products in order to stock a shop.

We have extensive database and programming experience, but not in PHP or MySQL, so we can't currently modify it ourselves. Presumably 2 new tables (a SKU definition table holding stock qty, price(s) and product id info among other things, plus a link table between this record and the product attributes table) are necessary, plus the changes in the PHP code to deal with it ?

I would go so far as to say that ALL clothing, foowear and apparel retailers would need this functionality, or something very similar.

[shamusOmalley]

I totally need this too. In my case it is not quite as complicated as I may have a single product with 5 sizes. I have dug in to the code and see how difficult it would be to implement especially on the admin side. I am seriously considering listing as single products if I can't find a solution.

[kobra]

shamusOmalley,

If you have 5 variations look at the cross sell mod in the downloads section I recall it will handle 6 that are set up individually but all listed in one

[shamusOmalley]

Thanks much. I will check it out!

[Bunster]

This thread may be of interest to you..

http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showth...900#post225900