we want to use the shared choices to prevent staff from re-typing color and sizes over and over. however when we add shared color and size to a product, it displays all of the colors and sizes on the store product page regardless of the inventory on hand entered at the color size level in the admin area.


so say you have colors red, blue and green, in sizes small, medium, and large and you have product "a" and "b". product "a" only comes in red and blue, small and medium, and "b" comes in all colors but only small. if i use shared choices, and for product "a" for the green size options set the value for inventory to "o" the product page still displays all of the combinations including green which has no inventory. if you try to add an invalid combination to the cart (following this example color green for product a), meaning a combination with inventory set to 0, the cart is smart enough to tell the shopper that it is not avaiable, but this not the best case for the shopper since we have over 100 hundred colors.

so what is the middle ground? how do we avoid not typing colors and sizes in for every single product or if we preferably use shared choices, how do we keep the product page from displaying all of the choices with 0 inventory? the other reason for needing this is our colors and sizes have a unique 4 digit identifiers (we want to set to the value) which we need to properly link our invenotry to our merchandising systems. if we asked customer service to enter the 4 digit number everytime they entered a color or size, the human error would rise.


thanks


:idea:

Would it help to create a bunch of (empty shell) products to clone? Set up choice combinations A-Z and clone them to create the product that needs those combinations. This will allow you to make 'shared' combinations of choices without having them change except on that product's edit page.


A major shortcoming in the basic BVC scheme... you can't grab a shared set of choices and choose to 'unshare' it as it is applied to a product. Cloning a product filled with editable choices is a good alternative though.