Bundles and dependent products

[florin_oltean]

Hello,

I am playing around with KonaKart and I am fairly decided to use it in the next project but I have some questions related mainly to bundles:

Does KonaKart have support for bundles?

If not, is it possible to set a price to a category and get everything in it (this would be a "simulated bundle")?

I tried to configure dependent products and it worked OK in admin app; however, I can't really see any difference in user front end meaning that I expected that once I select a product the dependent ones are automatically put in the shopping cart or at least you should have a warning. How exactly works the "dependent product" feature?

Thank you in advance,

Florin

[julie]

Hi Florin,

At the moment KonaKart doesn't support bundles, but it is definitely on our ToDo list and we could prioritize it for the next release if you were interested in this feature. Since you have been "playing" with KonaKart and are probably familiar with the Admin App, we could even collaborate on how you feel bundles should be implemented?

When you configure one of the merchandising features (up-sell, cross sell, dependent products etc) for a product, you see them displayed in a tile when you view the product details. Since you have them at that point, it would be a trivial exercise to add them to the basket automatically if that's what you need to do. We don't do it automatically in our application because a dependent product could be an extended guarantee etc. which people can purchase optionally.

-Julie

[florin_oltean]

Hello,

Thank you for fast reply; I will start with the easy part:

1. dependent products: taking over your suggestion I guess I can define a custom product attribute as an indicator if the dependent product is mandatory to buy along with the initial selection.

2. bundles: I see bundles as a mix between categories and products.
More precisely, from admin point of view,

• the bundle should behave much like a product (i.e. same properties, definition flow, possibility to be included in a category, promotions, etc)


• but it can also contain other products, like a category can (i.e. one should use the same mechanisms that is implemented today for assigning products to category for assigning products to bundles).

From user point of view, the changes are:

• once a bundle is selected, the descriptions of all items in the bundle are visible in the bundle description but without price information for each item


• the shopping card item for the bundle should have the same characteristics as an item for products but will also contain subitems for each product part of the bundle; the price is listed only for the bundle

I think that most part of my expectations are really presentation issues which can be handled via changes in JSP files, what is really missing is datamodel support and admin flow to create bundles.

As an indication, in order to solve this problem without changes to KonaKart engine or datamodel, I was thinking to:

• define categories in admin app with special properties (maybe custom) so that they are not visible


• define ordinary products in admin app that contains the characterisitcs of the bundle (price, promotions, description, etc)


• link the previsously defined products and categories via some custome attributes


• change the presentation layer

The problem is that this approach is not natural for the admin and it is error prone.

Regards,

Florin

[julie]

1. dependent products: taking over your suggestion I guess I can define a custom product attribute as an indicator if the dependent product is mandatory to buy along with the initial selection.

Yes you can.

2. bundles: I see bundles as a mix between categories and products.

Another idea is similar to what you mention in your original mail and is to use one of the merchandising types since these link a parent product to one or more other child products. The parent product could be a virtual product that describes the bundle. When someone selects it and adds it to the basket, you could avoid adding it to the basket and add all of its children instead.

If the price of the bundle is not the sum of the children you could calculate the new price by storing multiple prices for the child products. i.e. A price when it is sold alone and a price when sold in a bundle. Since you know this information when it is added to the cart, you can use it to determine which price to pick up.

Regards,

Julie

[florin_oltean]

hello,

RE bundles:

Bundling is an extremely important thing for marketing guys and therefore the mechanisms required to support it must be very flexible; one can dare to say that the differentiator between merchants is how they manage to bundle their goods.

The first approach (dependent products) it's suboptimal from flexibility point of view because:

• the number of prices attached to a product is limited 


• when you define a product you must anticipate if it will be part of a bundle and which one in order to set the price; usually you don't


• as the name implies, in my mind I see a dependency relationship when talking about "dependent products"; the name of the concept must have something to do with it  . However, bundling does not imply any dependency relationship between products, it is simply a trick to sell the goods.

Thanks,

Florin

[julie]

the number of prices attached to a product is limited   
when you define a product you must anticipate if it will be part of a bundle and which one in order to set the price; usually you don't

Maybe the virtual product could contain the price of the bundle or a discount to apply to the child products ? If it contains the price, then it could be added to the basket alongside the children where the children have a price of zero. It can become complex if you then try to add any of the children as not part of the bundle. The kkEngine code would need to be aware that they should be treated differently.

-Julie

[florin_oltean]

Hi Julie,

If KonaKart team decides to implements bundle support in future versions of product, I would advise to:

• make the bundle definition as easy as possible


• the bundle should have all characteristics of a product (prices, promotions, description, etc)


• allow a product to be part of any number of bundles or to be sold stand alone


• allow a bundle to contain any number of products, irrespective of their type


• when the user selects a bundle, the prices of individual product from the bundle should not be relevant and should not be displayed


• the cross-sell, up-sell, accessories and dependant products should be dynamically constructed by the system based on aggregation of the merchandise characteristics of each product


• the bundle should have a static description (like any product) and an dynamic description listing individual descriptions of the products from the bundle


• the shopping cart should clearly mark the bundle lines as opposed to product lines; this means that the user should readily see that a line on the shopping cart refers to a bundle

Now, from technical point of view, how KonaKart team decide to tackle this ... I can't really comment.
Anyway you are doing a excelent job so I am sure you will take the best decision.

Florin

[julie]

Thanks Florin,

We appreciate your feedback and will certainly take it into consideration.

Does anyone else have anything to add regarding requirements for bundles ?

-Julie

[nitros]

I could definitely see a great need for bundling products and florin_oltean beautifully summarizes the requirement for Product bundles.

Currently, we plan to provide bundle products by creating a separate product with the description describing its contents and a picture with the word "Combo" on it.

[rula]

Hi konakarts,

it seems bundles needs a (main?) manufacturer (mandantory!) and a model like single products too.

regards rula

[pete]

Yes, a bundle is treated like a normal product.