One car part for several different cars/years/brands...

Hi, newbie here, I've looked around but don't see an answer to my challenge, apologies if I missed it!

I am setting up ZC for a car parts seller. We have 3 primary manufacturer brands (Ford, Peugeot and Citroen) and we have up to 40,000 parts to fit the various makes and models. My challenge is how do I enter the details of a clutch kit for example but then link it to miultiple cars? Often a Citroen and a Peugeot will share a part not just across those brands but also across different models. In a similar way I have to add the cars that our parts will fit...now there are 5 body types of Peugeot 206, 12 engine variants and 11 manufacturing years which means I have to make over 600 entries just to cover Peugeot 206! there must be a better way...please help!

Under Category>Products see the C, next to your attributes button? You can use that to Copy to products that share the same specs.

Hi, thanks for that input. I have sussed the copy function and I can add products quite quickly that are appropriate to several vehicles. The primary challenge is adding all the cars...it would be a lot easier if instead of a drop down list of cars I could create a check box matrix where I could select as many cars as necessary in one product page...I'm sure this can be achieved somehow but I'm not sure if the changes need to be made in ZC, PHP or mySQL!

I've a sneaking suspicion I need to get into PHP but hoping for further advice from this forum...I have ordered "mySQL & PHP For Dummies"...which might help...