Sounds like your catalog is setup in a non-standard way. I really don't understand what you mean by the "Cart has to go get a page." That doesn't make any sense to me.

http://acepetproducts.com/IUC-5200.aspx would be a "Product Page" in our terminology. You're presenting a product with option. Cart.aspx would be the cart page in our terminology.

The reason that your page "refreshes" after every selection is that you've used "Choices" as the drop down list type. Choices are used to track inventory and individual skus on variations.

If you want to send only one SKU to the cart.aspx page and display selections you can use "Modifiers" which do not allow inventory tracking or custom SKUs.

If you want to use "Choices" and track inventory, the product page has to refresh after every selection to ensure that the selections are valid and in stock, otherwise the customer has to click the "Add to Cart" button every time to see if something is in stock or not.

You can mix and match choices and modifiers. Only use choices on selections that are used to track inventory and skus. Use Modifers for others.

Mark,

Currently you are using Choices instead of Modifiers. The main difference, as Marcus mentioned, is that Choices give you more control. Each choice combination can have a different price, description, image, etc and inventory is tracked for each choice combination. When a customer makes a selection the page updates via AJAX (the URL does not change and only part of the page is reloaded); inventory is also checked at this point so if a chosen choice combination is not in stock of available the Add to Cart button will be removed.

Modifiers, on the other hand, only affect the price, weight and shipping adjustment. Making a selection does not cause the page to update.


If the price for each choice combination is the same, you can do a mass-update from the main product entry screen. Just click the green arrow icon next to the price (or any other field you want to update) and it will copy that value to every choice combination.

Mark,

I'm not sure that I have much advice to offer you. It sounds like you should be using choices (variations), not modifiers, since you want to track individual SKU's for each choice. I really don't understand the problems you're having with duplicate content and updating the prices. All of the choices are still contained within one page (i.e. percieved as one page/product to customers and search engines) and the page content doesn't need to change unless you really want to have a different description, image, etc for each choice combination. Updating product information across all choice combinations is a simple matter of changing the value in the parent SKU and clicking the green arrow next to the field to update all choice combinations.

Reading between the lines it sounds like the real problem is with your backend system or the integration thereof.

I believe one of the biggest changes made to BV5 from BV2004 was the seperation of Modifiers/Variations.

In BV2004, we add a choice, we can append a value (i.e. SKU) to the choice. This is then tied to inventory control.

Due to the ever changing WWW and online shopping expectations, when a product with a choice on a BV2004 website is added to the cart, the only changes seen is on the admin order ticket in that, if properly setup, the SKU in the order is changed to the value entered via the product admin. Additionally, the choices are displayed on the cart page.

So what was the problem?

For someone like myself, I have a motorcycle helmet that comes in 14 colors and 6 sizes. The product page has all the necessary items and presentation elements required to sell each individual product.

However, on BV2004, when a customer chooses a X-Large Red Multi-Color Helmet, the customer sees the original thumbnail image of the helmet and no true reflection of their choice on the shopping cart page. i.e. Product Name doesn't necessarily reflect the actual product in the cart.

So that causes confusion. "Hey, I chose the Red helmet, why do I see a picture of the black helmet?" one might silently ask oneself in a working environment or outloud at home.

With the integration of the anthem controls to a BV5 product page, when a customer makes the choice of an X-Large, Red Multi-Color helmet, the anthem controls updated to reflect that choice. The product name changes to the red (if assigned to the variation), the image changes to the red (if it's assigned to the variation), the SKU changes (assigned to the variation), the price changes (if needed, assigned to the variation), the description changed (it assigned to the variation).

Once added to the cart, the shopper sees the name of the red helmet, the thumbnail of the Red Helmet, the SKU of the red helmet and the price of the Red Helmet.

This is exactly how the online shopping experience has evolved.

I'm no professional programmer, I make things look nice and load fast, but I believe that code behind and/or logic to handle inventory control on a system that now has two completely seperate 'Customer Choice' controls is way more complex than what's in BV2004.

Not a solution, rather an observation from a long time BV user. :)