Three Choices to calculate price

[chris ashdown]

Looking at the best way to implement the following

I want to offer transfer printing on my site which has the following requirements

A choice of number of colours 1 to 5
A choice of sizes, 1 to 3 or 4
The number of transfers min 25 no max

Price is dependant on combination of all three choices

I guess the answer is a matrix calculation, but outside my knowledge,

colour and size would be easy to do using componants but bringing in the third makes a lot of combinations

[skinnybloke]

Hi Chris - let me know if you come up with anything for this.

I have just had an initial discussion with a jeweller who wants a customer to be able choose ring mount, diamond cut, colour, clarity and carat - 5 variables which all affect the price !!!

[chris ashdown]

Any sugestions?

[drink75]

I had this problem and managed to find a workaround but it was everybit as complicated as you would imagine.
What I had to do was to create a hidden product for each possible combination:

Hidden Product 1:
Colour 1, Size 1

Hidden Product 2:
Colour 1, Size 2

Hidden Product 3:
Colour 1, Size 3

and so on...and so on...and so on...and so on...

Then you need to create a new product with a component containing the two choices which you can link to the hidden products using the permutations tab associated to the component.

This is not a simple job if you have a lot of varying products but, if the choices apply to all your product you can simply copy/paste the component to each new product.
To speed things up you might also find that by building the hidden products in excell as a spread sheet then importing them in will be quicker but you will still have to manually enter the permutations!

Finaly, I think you can set the min quantity for each product somewhere but not sure where.
This will work aslong as your prices remain fixed regardless of how many are ordered. Otherwise you will have to look into quantity based pricing. There is a section about this in the printed user manual I think.

take a look at http://www.vinylrides.co.uk/acatalog/Flame_Section_1.html
to see it working.

[Bruce]

If you are intending to use stock controll for the choices then the method described above is the way to go. The other way will be to create a product and leave the price at 0.00, then create a component called 'Transfers ' for example and select 'Component as seperte orderline', then create an attribute and choices below the attribute with the prices for each number entered in the 'HTML for name' field for the individual choice. Once this is done you can then click on the 'Permutations' tab of the component and click on 'Fill List', here it will now display all permutations where you can specify the price for each. Either method is tedious work till it all falls in place.

Kind regards,

[chris ashdown]

Thanks Bruce & Steve

Not really the solution I was hopeing for, maybe put it on back burner for a while

With a rethink maybe i could cut it down to three products
Size Small
Size Medium
Size Large

Each with 5 colour options
Single colour
Two Colours
Three Colours
Four Colours
Five Colours

& Transfer Numbers
Min 25
50
100
200

But the price is dependant on the numbers brought which reduces as the numbers increase i.e. min 25 costs say £1.00 each but 200 may only cost £0.25
and the two colours cost more than the single price and so on

Maybe its easier to put it in a table and let them work it out but thats not the best use of the computer power and maybe a step backwards

Frustrated

[drink75]

I quite agree with you.
With the Vinyl site I showed you I have now decided on a much simpler way of doing things involving less options. Maybe this will effect sale, maybe it won't but at least I can avoid the same hardships creating the other 960 products that are still to go on that site.

I have read a few posts that mention about how you can do one product and then export it to a .csv file which should then allow you to create an entire sites products with compontents etc in Excell. I have tried but the resulting file mean nowt to me!

But of luck which ever route you decide to go.

[chris ashdown]

I like the way you have done it but would like to show the price before pressing the "add to cart" as I think people would be reluctant to click though without knowing the price