Posted 18 November 2013 - 10:23 PM
#38
In my back-end order management system, we tried to support "product kits". I use the furniture paradigm to describe it. I.e. a Dining Set product that provides a table (with optional leaf), 4 chairs (with optional upholstery and finish options). The complexity is taking a single product like a chair that is setup to have lets say 2 upholstery options (upholstery 1 and upholstery 2) and 2 finish options (finish 1 and finish 2).
Easy to setup for a "chair" product. But when this is part of a "kit", how much does each option impact the "kit"price/weight? Also, the option needs to be selectable once for all chairs versus once for each chair. Nobody wants a simple discount structure applied to a "kit" so it gets very complex, very fast.
Needs to also be able to add a chair to the kit (at appropriate pricing and ensure that the chair is in stock with those options) as well as leafs to the table. But should that added chair be priced the same as 1/4th the charis in the 4 chair set? Or would it be priced differently?
And that's just furniture. jewelry, pharmaceutical and other "mixture" products have a whole different set of issues.
Hence the complexity is high no matter what you do; which equates to a lot of developer hours of which most people are not willing to pay for.
My guess is that when cs-cart looked at how many people use the configurator as a buying decision go/nogo point, they found it to be less than the investment required to make the feature useable/maintainable and hence put it into the public domain for people to use and/or for a developer to pick up support for. Purely a business decision.
Companies obsolete products/features all the time that turn out to be less profitable or more expensive than originally intended. You can't even buy a Coke in the US that has sugar in it instead of HFCS. But people still tend to buy Coke. If you want sugar in your Coke, you'll have to buy a Mexican import at about $2.50/bottle. You can continue to use the one that exists in V4.0.3 and hopefully it will work on V4.1.0. If not, you'll be stuck at V4.0.3.
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