How Have You Gotten Around Attribute Model Numbers?

I'm in a real pickle, here.

I took a gig a while ago the needed to use a shopping cart solution to integrate with Quickbooks AND their fulfillment center.

Everything seems to be going just fine on my end until I hit the attribute model number snag.

ZenCart doesn't allow you to use different Model Numbers for specific attributes (XL Blue). Because of this, I'm in a HUGE pickle here.

What I was wondering was how any of you out there in ZenCart land have gotten around this nasty reality. Can you make a sub-category for the product and have all the variations listed and disable the Product page so they can't click on individual colors? Just let them add the products to the cart, directly?

Is that possible? Any help or direction would be appreciated! Thanks!

We've only experienced the problem for a client who was managing stock at the same level. So for them we extended the table used in stock by attributes to add a product variant SKU.

It can be a lot of work if you have a lot of products because you have to create separate attributes for each product, but we have added the model number to the option name - XL Blue 12345.