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 Help! to customize the inventory look and feel
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keng
VP-CART New User

152 Posts

Posted - November 07 2004 :  16:17:38  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Hi,

In version 5.5, you have the ability to control and sell your items according to its feature. Ex. If you are selling a t shirt color red, blue and white, you can control the number of items that you sell through colors.

Anyways, when you use this feature in 5.5, it simply generates a column table in file shoproductformatinventory in subroutine

Sub ProductFormatInventoryRow (rs)

I don't know ASP but is it possible to make it a drop down box instead of a table?

Example: If I sell a shirt, by default, VPASP would generate a table at the bottom that indicates Small, Medium and Large.

I wish somebody can help me make it a drop down box instead of a table to save space in my webpage and make it look more professional.

Pls. help! Thanks!

keng
VP-CART New User

152 Posts

Posted - November 14 2004 :  19:23:18  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Bump!

Does anybody here have a template that I could use so that my buyers use a drop down box to choose which size of shirt, color, etc. they are buying instead of using the table of VPASP inventory control feature?

The default "feature" utility that vpasp use does not have the ability to control the number of items. Does anybody have some templates I could use?

Thanks for all your help!

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calliope
Starting Member

45 Posts

Posted - November 15 2004 :  15:20:10  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Bump...
I am not using this feature because of this issue. A dropdown would be perfect!

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keng
VP-CART New User

152 Posts

Posted - December 04 2004 :  18:06:04  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Any Solution to this?

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keng
VP-CART New User

152 Posts

Posted - May 11 2005 :  23:33:30  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
I wonder.. am I the only one here who is using the Inventory Control by Feature? How come I rarely hear people saying anything about this feature? If this design could only be improved, my life would be so smooth!

Problem: For example, I sell T-shirt. I will call this T-shirt my "parent product" with three different colors Red, White and Blue which we'll call each color as its "Child product". If I need to control inventory for each color, VPASP's solution to this is to use the Inventory Control Feature.

The problem with that is it creates a table at the bottom and not a common "drop down" list. The effect is that, when a customer tries to view the large image for the "parent item", they don't see the child products below. They need to click the "Back button" to see the table to pick the color.

Sorry, hope my explanation above is clear. But does anybody has a a better solution to this? Thanks!

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calliope
Starting Member

45 Posts

Posted - May 12 2005 :  08:07:50  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
I'm having the sampe problem and I guess others do also (See post http://www.vpasp.com/virtprog/vpaspforum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3701)

I've contacted support for a quote on this customization but it's quite a bit of $. I've asked if the price can be lowered by teaming with another site. Their response is that the customization is very complex and they could only support one site (so the other site would have to get all the changed files and fend for themselves). I'm still debating whether it's worth the dough or simply better to go with another cart.

If you're an asp programmer then maybe going in together might work. We could split the cost (me paying for more) and I can send you all the changed files. Let me know.


I got a request to give a little more info on the modification. The parent/child modification will allow you to specify a parent product and then associate a number of child products with this parent product.
You then have a choice over how the child product displays as in you can choose it to display as a drop down list, actual products that can be ordered in their own right with a radio or check box or you can have an order button next to the child product so it can be ordered individually. Examples with drop-down http://www.hypnoskates.com/shop/shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=18&cat=Specials and http://www.smartdigital.com.au/shopexd.asp?id=37415
You will be able to choose the display by each parent product so you may have one parent product displaying its children products by dropdown menu, and another parent product displaying its children with a radio or check box.


Edited by - calliope on May 12 2005 10:18:08
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devshb
Senior Member

United Kingdom
1904 Posts

Posted - May 13 2005 :  17:05:13  Show Profile  Visit devshb's Homepage  Reply with Quote
I might be wrong, but off-hand I'd think that a possible reason for the time/cost being quite high would be because normally turning those links into a poplist would involve adding form tags around the poplist so that the javascript could pick out the chosen value. That in turn would cause problems because all the other fields are embedded inside form tags already.

It might be possible to solve that by the poplist javascript call passing across the internal form id somehow, but I think the general problem is that a poplist would normally be part of a form with the javascript using that form name, whereas on the product pages the forms work a bit differently.

That's just a guess though to be honest.

Simon Barnaby
Developer
[email protected]
www.BigYellowZone.com
Web Design, Online Marketing and VPASP addons
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calliope
Starting Member

45 Posts

Posted - May 13 2005 :  20:59:04  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
We've decided to do the modification on our site and then sell the files at a much reduced fee (vpasp will provide me with a zip of all the changed files, which I'll sell). If anyone is interested please let me know. I'll post a link to our site when it's working.





Edited by - calliope on May 14 2005 07:02:28
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greatphoto
VP-CART Super User

USA
304 Posts

Posted - May 21 2005 :  22:40:36  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Yes, this problem caused us much extra work in building our site. We started on this before version 5.50 was released with its inventory products feature. (Keng, sorry I didn't write about it earlier. You are not alone. bump, bump, bump ;-) )

We sell clothing and, of course, clothing comes in different sizes. In VP-ASP, sizes would be considered to be different product features. However, we must also use inventory control so customer's don't end up purchasing something that has sold out. However, "inventory control is not compatible with product features." Agh!

One solution is to create a separate product listing for every size. This is tedious and requires a lot of redundant typing or copy/paste. If you want to change what you wrote, you have to do it again and again to change all the copies. Further, you must consider how this will display. You don't want a separate image and full description for every size, and this is confusing and redundant for the customer.

Our solution was to make every size be its own product listing. We then put all those sizes into one category specific to the product. For example, if our product is Hanes white T-shirt, then we make a category called Hane's white T-shirt. We then make 4 separate products under that category: one each of Hane's white T-shirt Small, Medium, Large, X-Large.

We use a custom template to create a minimalist display of the 4 copies of the product within the category. No image, no description, perhaps even no price if the price is the same for all 4 sizes. So where to the description, image, and price go? They go in the category heading. What, VP-ASP doesn't offer category headings. Well, you're right. That's custom code, but I laid out how to do it here: http://www.vpasp.com/virtprog/vpaspforum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2626

One big downside to this is that I haven't yet figured out how to grab fields from the database to use in the header HTML. Most importantly, I'd like to grab the product price from the dB for display in the category header. Hardcoding the price in the header is tedious and risky since it could end up accidently being different from the price that shows up in the cart. ....and if you decide to run a sale, you have to change the price in 5 places: Once in the database for each of the four product listing, and once in the category header.

Its clumsy and confusing, but its all we had to work with in VP-ASP 5.0. Its easier to understand when you see the complete system in operation.

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keng
VP-CART New User

152 Posts

Posted - May 22 2005 :  13:23:08  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
Thanks Greatphoto! I haven't done it yet but I appreciate your time sharing. This is something I could review and consider.

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greatphoto
VP-CART Super User

USA
304 Posts

Posted - May 22 2005 :  15:48:40  Show Profile  Reply with Quote
quote:

Thanks Greatphoto! I haven't done it yet but I appreciate your time sharing. This is something I could review and consider.



Well, I don't mean to say that its a full solution...just that its the workaround that I've used. Its frustrating when we remember that we're going through all this extra work just to allow inventory control to operate correctly. It leads me to often question just how important inventory control is....but we come back around to the basic premise of our store and decide its important. Customer service is first priority and high on the list for delivering good customer service is having the listed order items in stock. If its not in stock, it needs to be removed from the site.

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