Often when dealing with software with a lot of flexibility, you run into scenarios where a little foresight would be nice, and hindsight is 20/20. With the product Type Properties I can see this is one of those traps when you have finished setting it up one way, you realize that an entirely different way would have been better. And changing them around later looks like it would be a fair amount of work.



Clearly it makes sense to use a logical grouping of some kind to get this feature to work right, rather than giving each product its own unique type. Since each product can only have one type, it is important to ensure each type meets all of the requirements it was intended for.



The video presentation in the manual shows the product type being a "shirt". Using a type like that might make it easy to add to the product search to make it easy to find. However, what if one of your shirt manufacturers has a "quick ship" feature that none of the others have that you need to make into a type property? Does it make more sense to make the product type the same as the manufacturer? Does it make more sense to make each group of related products an individual manufacturer makes into a type? Or should they be groups of products across manufacturers? Would it be better to put all of your products as the same type? Of course, there might be other options I am not even considering.



Sure, you can use them any way you want, but it would be nice if there were some constraints in place to ensure the wrong path isn't followed. This is akin to saying that it is possible to use inline SQL to make random calls to the database to your web site, but odds are it is not a good idea to do that.



A couple of other things I should mention is that I currently have half a dozen or so custom type properties (this probably makes no difference one way or another, but I mention it just in case). Another thing I would like to do to my site at some point is to try to implement a narrowing list of choices. For example, someone is looking for a shirt, they would check a box labeled "shirt" and the category view would narrow to display all of the shirts. Then the customer checks a box labeled "$10-$20" and the category view would narrow to all of the shirts between $10 and $20, etc. until the customer gets a short enough list to make a decision.



So, this post is just to find out how others have set up product types to get some ideas about how they are most effectively used. I would also like to hear of ways that people have set up their product types that didn't meet their needs, and how they fixed the issue.

dotNet guy,

We just launched a site that used a drill-down/layered navigation/faceted search system. It sounds like a good solution for what you're describe. Take a look at the link below for details.

http://forums.bvcommerce.com/de...lt.aspx?f=95&m=65233