I am using BV Commerce 5.6.


Basically what I am trying to do is add a check box for a couple of add-on items. These items are each products that will also be available as separate items. I managed to get this effect by using kitting and adding a check box (mulit) selection and it works great from the customer side.



However, when the items are added to the cart, the kit is a single "item" with 2 sub-items. They also appear in the drop ship email as only 1 item. The problem is, the vendor won't know what this kit is - he needs to see each item and SKU.



So, is there a way to show all of the items on the invoice/drop ship notice with kitting, or am I better off creating a custom control for add-on items and my own implementation of the add to cart button?



Note - I haven't used kitting yet and it would mean that I would have to build a whole new template to match my fairly complex product page layout.

Actually, the number of "kits" will probably end up being less than 5% of the products on the site.



However, after analyzing the way kits work I am more inclined to build my own solution rather than trying to mess with customizing the email. The biggest issue is that kits don't support volume discounts. If I build a custom solution to run "add to cart" for each item that is checked (thus adding multiple items to the cart), I can work around this limitation. Editing any of those items will bring the customer back to the product page (thus eliminating any confusion on where they can order them). I will also make each product name displayed into a link to the actual product page.



I want to be able to show for each "add on":



1. Product Image Thumbnail

2. Product Name

3. Product Url

4. Site Price

5. Add To Cart Check Box

6. Quantity (optional)

7. Volume Discounts (optional)



The volume discounts will likely need to be in a popup.



To do this, it looks like I will need to store in the product configuration for each "add-on":



1. Product Bvin (string)

2. Show Quantity (boolean)

3. Show Volume Discounts (boolean)



While I don't plan on having more than about 3 add-on items for any product, it still makes sense to make these items into a collection. So it is looking like adding an XML property to the CustomProperties of Product is the way to go.



I can make a copy of the "Cross-Sell/UpSell" page in BVAdmin that can be used to manage the collection of add-ons.



I can make a custom control to display the list of add-ons as I described above. Then I can build a custom Add To Cart button which will raise an event to my product page. The product page can then read the properties from the "add-on" control and pass them to the EventArgs of the event. Then it is just a matter of adding the items to the cart that are checked in addition to the current item.



This all seems very straightforward, so I think I will go this route.



The only wildcard is that some products have add-ons that will need to match the color of the product. So it looks like these add-ons will need to be part of the product choice combination rather than the parent product - which means I will need this to be part of the "product variations" as well as the custom page based on cross-sell/upsell I mentioned above.