Product options are the choice a customer must make when purchasing a product. Typical examples are size or side (left or right).
The screenshot above highlights the product options for a Santini jacket – size. The customer must select their desired size before adding the product to their basket.
In Visualsoft admin, the options are also referred to as variants.
When importing products using the CSV import function, the option is referred to as an Attribute in the mapping fields.
The admin page for Product Options: http://fawkescycles.dev.visualsoft.co.uk/vs-admin/product_options/
There are two types of products:
- Products with no options
- Products with one or more options
Products with options create a hierarchy, where there is a Parent and Child relationship. Certain attributes, such as title and images can be assigned to the parent product and/or each of the child products.
Parent and Child References
All products have a Product Reference (or Parent Reference) and a Variant Reference (or Child Reference).
If the product has no options, the parent and child references are usually identical.
If the product has options, there will be a Child Reference for each option. The Child Reference is usually the Parent Reference with a suffix to indicate the option. For example, if the Parent Reference is 123456 the child product in a small size might have a Child Reference 123456S and the child product in a medium size the Child Reference 123456M.
The diagram below shows the typical parent and child hierarchy:
The above would result in 5 product records, each having common parent attributes (Parent Reference, Parent Product Title, Subtitle, Summary, Description, etc.) and their own child attributes (Child Reference, Child Product Title, Size, EAN, MPN, RRP, etc.).
A general rule of thumb is that the choice of colour is included in the product, NOT as a product option. For example: “Tifosi Auriga Disc Ultegra Carbon Road Bike – Red” or “Madison Trail Youth Short Sleeved Jersey – Krypton Lime” In these examples, the product option is size. When the customer selects the product, it is a fixed colour and they must then choose the size from a list of available sizes.
Another rule of thumb is that the products in the same parent group must all have the same price. This rule is to ensure that products conform to Googles e-commerce rules. Enforcing this rule requires consideration as to the best option to adopt for a given product type. Tyres for example could be grouped by model and the option could be the size, where size is diameter and width. So “Schwalbe Big Apple” tyres could be set up as a parent product with the options being “29 x 2.35 inch”, “26 x 2.0 inch”, “26 x 2.15 inch”, “24 x 2.0 inch”, “20 x 2.0 inch”, etc. However, the 29 inch diameter tyre is more expensive than the 20 inch tyre, so this would break the Google rule. Therefore, the solution to this is to choose model and diameter as the parent and width as the option. So “Schwalbe Big Apple – 29 inch” would be one parent and “29 x 2.35 inch” would be an option and “Schwalbe Big Apple – 26 inch” would be another parent with “26 x 2.0 inch” and “26 x 2.15 inch” as options, and so on.