Packs with combinations - help us test the new feature

[datakick]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to ask you for a help with testing upcoming new feature - Packs with Combinations. As you may know, it is currently not possible to have combinations for Pack products. This new feature add supports for that.

What is it good for?

For example, let say you are selling sport equipment. You want to create a bundle for soccer players containing soccer ball, socks, and cleats. Every one of those products in pack can have different variants (ball can have size 1-2-4-5, socks can have different colors and sizes,...). Because thirty bees does not support packs with combinations, you would have to create a dedicated Pack Product for every combination of products that you want to sell. That's not very user friendly, and it's very hard to maintain. That's why we have this new feature. 

How it works:

1) When you are adding a product with combinations to your pack, you can now select a special item variant named virtual attribute. (It's stupid name, I know. I'm open for better name suggestions 🙂 )

2) when you add this special variant to the pack, and save the product, thirty bees will automatically generate a matching Attribute containing all combinations of that product. 

This is a special Attribute that can be only used by Pack products that contains the virtual attribute item. System will make keep the attribute values in sync with existing combinations.

You can rename the attribute name, and also rename the attribute values.

3) In pack product, you can use this new attribute to create/generate combinations:

4) On front office, you now have an option to select specific combination of a pack:

 

This approach is not the nicest. I personally don't like the need for dedicated Attribute that is kept in synch with specific product combinations.

But by doing it this way, we have achieved backwards compatibility. Every modules that work with combinations/attributes can work with that. 

There are a lot of corner cases that I'd like your help with testing. If you are willing to help, you can use core updater. In module settings, select 'custom target' as your distribution channel, and then update to branch pack-combinations:

 

Thank you for your help!

 

[the.rampage.rado]

Quick few things from me and I'm continuing testing this great addition:

1. Can we push "virtual attribute" option to the top as I think this will be the most used option from this list (I doubt packs with attributes will be made for just one combination of a product). We can rename this to 'all combinations', as it will be more descriptive:

 

2. Packs with products does not follow "Calculate pack quantities automatically based on available quantities of items in pack":



3. Related to 1. -  I see that the 'Product variant' in combinations generator is per pack (not showing Product variants for other packs. But can we bump it to the top of the list? And even better can we automatically generate those combinations when pack is saved? In general this will save 3-4 clicks. I'm failing to think of a situation that the merchant will use packs with attributes and will not like toe assign all combinations?!




I don't see any conflicts with themes or emails so far.

[the.rampage.rado]

Making a new post as the screenshots are very annoying (or my way of doing them, idk...). Also should we create issues in github or report here if we find more stuff until this is in develpoment?

4. Packs don't subtract pack products when they are set up to.

In this configuration:

Purchasing a pack should subtract the pack's quantity per combination and each product's quantity in the appropriate combination. It does only subtract the pack's quantity and not the products'.

The same is applicable for Decrement products in pack only. - if the pack is set at it - the quantities are not subtracted in each pack product.

[x97wehner]

Oh dear lord.... this will be awesome once its functioning correctly. I'll test and follow up.

 

[30knees]

Is it developed enough to test in production stores or not yet?

 

[Smile]

On 3/5/2025 at 8:47 PM, 30knees said:

Is it developed enough to test in production stores or not yet?

 

I would wait a bit... Give it 2 weeks minimum.

[x97wehner]

This is a good start. While the backend is a bit clunky, i understand why you've built it this way. The challenge is on the front end, where the user isn't picking between the options to assemble the pack in the same experience that a standard combination product lays out on the same website.

Standard layout, user picks size and scent from dropdown

But on this new combination pack, the dropdowns are different and are just a consolidated list of every option possible. This might be okay for a small combination set, but is almost unusable for a large combination set.

The best experience would be for the front end to allow for the same exact experience of assembling options for a combination similar to this site below. They sell each of the components (golf grip, shaft, head) independently and this is a discounted pack option with a range of prices displayed based upon the combination criteria.

Until we're able to get a similar front end user experience between standard and pak products, this new feature would likely not be used by our store.

[datakick]

Thanks everyone for testing. I've created the issues for those problems, and will make sure they are addressed before we merge this into bleeding edge.

As we found out, the solution we implemented before was not good enough for all use cases. The virtual/dynamic attributes are fine in most cases, but sometimes we need even more flexibility. So we implemented yet another enhancement in this area -- full-fledged packs per combination.

You can now choose between two different versions of packs 

• Pack of existing products -- original implementation, when pack is defined on product lavel. You can use virtual/dynamic attributes here to tweak pack content using dynamic product attributes, as described in this thread above
• Pack of existing products - combinations -- new functionality. When you select this, you won't be able to define pack on product level, but you will have to define packs for every combination separately. This gives you great flexibility, as your combinations can have totally different/independent pack items. But obviously, it will be more complicated to set up, as you need to define pack content for every and each combinations. So choose this only when appropriate

 

 

Pack content on combination level:

This new functionality is in pack-combinations branch.

If you can, please help us with testing once again. 

 

[x97wehner]

Making progress here. Love it.

[the.rampage.rado]

When I click on the new option Pack of existing products - combinations and save the product it resets to Standard product. All other options work normally. Also the pack dropdown does not show. No errors are registered.

thirty bees is version 962287077d9bf33b803c35654f818ee1e368cb6b

[datakick]

Yeah, that's unfortunate. It's because there is actually no type column in product table. Product type is determined on thy fly from other product properties. For pack, there must be pack items in pack table.

So, you have to switch to 'Pack combination' type AND then, before you save product, go to Combination tab and assign pack content to at least one combination. That will lock it in

[30knees]

On 5/15/2025 at 5:44 PM, datakick said:

So, you have to switch to 'Pack combination' type AND then, before you save product, go to Combination tab and assign pack content to at least one combination. That will lock it in

Some type of tooltip hint for this could be helpful. I was going to report the same but saw the post.

For the pack-combination, I don't see the virtual attribute to select for the "parent" combination. Or do we create it ourselves? Currently, I would create an attribute "Pack of products" and select that so customers have some information.

Also, would it be possible to show the total price of the individual combinations compared to the pack price (or is that a theme thing and indepdent of the feature)?

Still testing ...