Volusion Help - Weights and Variations I

Let’s say we have this Volusion customer that sells beer. Awesome. The beer is comes in many different bubble formulas and are sold in 8oz, 12oz and 22oz bottles. The beer is sold at different weights depending on what part of the world it comes from. We have Belgium, American and German beer. To complicate things further, the beer bottles are available in two different types bottles. Let’s just bullet down all the business requirements again…

• 10oz - Belgium beer =$5, 10oz - American beer = $4, and 10oz of German beer = $3.
• 12oz - Belgium beer =$6, 12oz - American beer = $5, and 12oz of German beer = $4.
• 22oz - Belgium beer =$12, 22oz - American beer = $10, and 22oz of German beer = $8.
• Each type of beer comes in three different carbonation levels; slightly bubbly, really bubbly, and coming-out-of-your-nose bubbly. This is a free service.
• Each beer is bottled in your choice of clear or brown glass. There is no Volusion inventory for this. Consider it infinite in this use case.

What You Don’t Want!

Some Volusion customers tend to build more SKUs then they really need. Here are three things that can and usually do go wrong with setting up these products:

1. Some customers create unique parent SKUs for each weight and origin. That would lend itself to lots of redundant copy and massive administration. That’s not so great for the search engines or for your employees.
2. Some customers will add product options and categories to each SKU and immediately activate the “Enable Options Inventory Control”. This will create the inventory grid for every variation. Ugh! This would create a big list of grid options in the “Inventory Control Grid” that you would have to fill out which takes even more work.
3. To compound an already bad situation, some Volusion customers will even create unique child SKUs by entering a value in the “Inventory Grid ProductCode” field and clicking save. Oh no! Now you have just populated your entire product admin with many, many child products.

Help!

There is help with this Volusion example. I have outlined a very clean way of making your life easier in Volusion Help - Weights and Variations II.