Categories / Products Set-up Advice

Hello,

I am hoping there are some experienced Zen Carters out there who would be willing to offer some advice.

My employer is a fishing tackle shop with 'thousands' of products. Each of them have to be listed as individual products because our EPOS system does not work with the attributes system. I am informed that it is because it is just a text box and there is nothing it can link to. It is crucial that our EPOS system can keep count of stock levels so we are kind of stuck on this matter.

As a result of these limitations I have started utilising 'Categories' to try and group together products, for example:
Korda Krank Hook would be a category with all its sizes and options placed inside.

For a live example see our website: http://www.anglerscorner.co.uk/carp-fishing/carp-tackle/carp-hooks

An effective example of how I have set it up is to hover over the top menu, go to 'Carp Fishing / Carp Tackle and Carp Hooks'.

This seems to be the best way I can think to organise our products whilst being able to still keep an effective connection with our EPOS system, however it does look bloated with all of these categories... In the top menu and on the Category page for 'Carp Hooks'.

I was just wondering if there is anybody out there who can recommend a better way of setting things up that I might be unaware of?
Whether its Categories or some other feature ... any help would be really appreciated.

Many thanks in advance. :)

In what manner does "your EPOS system not work with the attributes system"? Does it require a specific model-number to associate a set of attributes to a product?

lat9:

In what manner does "your EPOS system not work with the attributes system"? Does it require a specific model-number to associate a set of attributes to a product?

It does, yes. :/

Actually I think I might have read that wrong... Our EPOS system requires that each product has a model number, as far as I am aware the attributes doesn't allow this. I have spoken to the makers of the system and they have said that zencart attributes are simply text boxes.

That's what I guessed. You can look either in the Zen Cart plugins area for the "Stock by Attributes (SBA)" plugin which, at some version, supports attribute-combination-specific model-numbers or you can search google for zen cart sba as there are also some commercial (i.e. priced) plugins that provide this feature.:wink:

Definitely sounds worth exploring. I will do just that.

Thank you very much :)