Selling Highly Configurable Products

Note: This page is still in progress.

Overview

Building a store to sell a highly configurable products can be a challenge, especially if the price of the item is based on a matrix of choices, or an aggregate of item options. There are several methods that you can use to build a site with highly configurable items, below you will find a description of these methods

Match-key method

Match a generated sku/id value against a preset price modifier option value.

In this method, you create a channel entry containing one price modifier that may contain many unique configuration SKUs. Basically this method would represent up to 100 configurations (perhaps more, but over that number system performance will be impacted)

CartThrob 10 limits generated Price Modifier Configurator combinations to 5,000 by default. Before increasing cartthrob_max_configurator_combinations, calculate the full product of every option group’s values and reduce unnecessary combinations. See the Price Modifiers Configurator fieldtype and Configuration Overrides.

Match-item method

Match a generated sku/id value against one of hundreds or thousands of preconfigured channel entries

Generated-price method

Each option has an associated price. For each selected option, JavaScript can update a hidden price field. That is customer-controlled: set allow_user_price="yes" on add_to_cart_form. A native example is on Hard Coding Price Modifiers. This is not as locked-down as matching a SKU to a channel price, because the posted price can be changed in the browser.