Product Customisation and Stock Levels

[intandem]

I am looking for creative ideas in how to solve the following issue:

 

I am setting up a Prestashop for a client who is an embroidery business and sells school uniforms for a number of schools. Only jumpers/sweaters, jackets and tracksuits.

 

For many of the products, customers can select from a variety of base products and then my client will embroider the relevant logo onto that base product before shipping. Several schools share the same colour-scheme, so the same base product applies to several schools.

 

From a customer point-of-view, it would be most user-friendly if they can simply select their own school from the catalogue and would then be presented with all the items available for their school. In the back office, we could then set up all the base products and then simply assign them to all the schools categories that they apply to. This would also make stock management easy because there would be one stock level for a particular base product and this would reduce no matter for which school it was bought. So far so good.

 

My problem though is that at the moment, when an order is placed we would have no idea out of which "catalogue", ie. school it was purchased and hence what logo needs to be embroidered on to it.

 

Alternative options of not using schools in the catalogue but just the base items and then customers have to write the school's name into a customisation text field are possible, but certainly not as user-friendly for the customer (as they would have to trawl through the catalogue to find all the individual items relevant to their school) and we naturally want to make this as easy a shopping experience for them as possible. Using attributes with each base-product is also not feasible because we then have to set different stock levels per attribute which makes no sense.

 

Anyway, if anybody has any other suggestions or knows how we can change the code to somehow show on the order from which catalogue category an item was purchased, please let me know. Any suggestions highly appreciated!

[cocothecat]

Found the description a bit confusing but im also lacking coffee!

 

What about creating categories just for X school so you have a menu option called schools then you have predefined subcategories so school A, school B and so on and within each school you have the entire uniform selection just for that school. That way the customer just needs to pick a jumper style and colour (so option one) round neck or V neck, (option two) blue or black.

 

The reference can be for each school so as the order comes in you know which school its been ordered for? Not sure if that helps or not but its another idea it also helps target a very small niche search for "st johns school uniform" within a search engine etc

 

Other option is

 

School Unifrom > Clothing Sub Cat

 

Jumper

 

Then your options are

 

Style (required)

 

Colour (required)

 

Emprodery for school

 

(drop down with school name)

 

IF no name provided from the above list from your pre approved schools jumper is sent blank unless contacted via email / phone to place a custom embroidery

[intandem]

Hi cocothecat, thanks for your reply! The problem with that solution is stock numbers. My client would have to assign stock levels to each school's items. But because they're all using the same base product, the actual stock figures would be incorrect.

 

E.g. base product blue v-neck jumper. 50 in stock. 25 assigned to school A and 25 to school B. 25 orders are placed for school A, now item out-of-stock. But in reality, there are still 25 more available so another order could be serviced for school A (as the logos are only embroidered onto them AFTER the order has been placed). My client would have to constantly move stock numbers around.

 

I really appreciate your suggestion though and if I misunderstood it somehow please let me know.

Edited March 25, 2013 by intandem (see edit history)

[cocothecat]

Yeah that was option 1. So what about the last idea.

 

If you create 1 product called V-Neck

 

You could have the following as attribute value

 

Colour, Custom Embroidery, School Embroidery (pick a school)

 

You would need to do a bit of modification so the stock reflects the colour combination only rather than the actual school name or embroidery level shouldnt be too hard. Not sure if ive explained that well enough though!

 

So in essance you have it so your attribues do no require their own stock levels they all function from the one core stock value

Edited March 25, 2013 by cocothecat (see edit history)