Product Bundle feature like Magento

[mak]

Does anyone know of a viable solution for Product Bundles; maybe a module? I need the same functionality as magento. Not really sure why none of the other ecommerce platforms have this feature. Yes Thirty Bees has the Product Pack, but that's not really what a product bundle should be like. Computer parts have a lot of different configurations and it should be more like this video of a Magento Product Bundle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yCbxbcCUCM

Have to postpone my switch to a better platform (Thirty Bees), again, because of a single necessary feature...feels like Magento has me in a vice grip, lol! I have been trying for a year now to switch, but I can't find any ecommerce platform that fits the mold.

Magento: Would be great if it were not so slow and overly complicated in Magento 2 (seems very similar to what Prestashop is doing) Wordpress with WooCommerce: Excellent Themes, lacks an "Add To Quote" plugin that actually works, is too slow for large sites, and lacks a ton of features. OpenCart: Themes are decent, very fast platform, but lacks a properly working "Add To Quote" plugin so I didn't bother looking any further. Shopify: Themes are terrible, very fast platform, lacks a good "Add To Quote" plugin, lacks a FedEx plugin(have to get their $299 per month plan to add this feature) and the product bundles are essentially similar to that of Thirty Bees Product Pack. Thirty Bees: Themes are very nice, fast platform, able to keep url's the same as in Magento (makes my life so much easier), an import feature that works on thousands of categories/products in under a minute (I have 1140 categories and over 5000 products), "Add To Quote (devis)" plugin that is very similar to that of Cart2Quote for Magento, FedEx plugin, Authorize.net built in, and the only thing that it lacks for me is a real Product Bundle feature. This important feature is the only thing keeping me from being able to switch.

[moy2010]

Thirtybees handles products with options with its combinations system. It's not exactly the same functionality as the one from Magento, but a few things can be achieved with it.

It would be awesome if we had something like it, it has been requested several times.

[DaoKakao]

As it seems to me a drawback of such bundle functionality in magento is its slowness. As far as i know, in the PS/TB family it is possible to make similar things not only with combinations mentioned above, but also with a product packs.

[mak]

I agree its similar, but only half way there. For example, it lets you group the products by typing and selecting a product by SKU, but that is where the similarity ends. It needs to be able to let you group multiple products under each attribute by selecting from you list of products. Also, it needs to be able to update the price every time something is selected in the set by the customer. The current PrestaShop and Thirty Bees setup is only good for something like a grocery store or clothing store where they only need to have color, size, etc. attributes or just needing to bundle products to give a discount. But i'm willing to be that the Magento version of Product Bundles would help them too.

As for the slowness, it has to do with the coding. Magento 1 runs just fine for me on a the shared magento hosting from nexcess.net. My pages load in about 2 seconds and all the same features I talk about are there. Thats not bad for magento. They have made Magento 2 overly complicated and heavy, therefore requiring a much more expensive server to achieve those load times. The one thing that really bothers me in Magento 2 is having to compile static files every time you make a change to the css files. Very buggy process. I ended up having to restore a backup because something ended up deleting core files, lol. To me, Magento 2 is about as ready as PrestaShop 1.7.

[Traumflug]

it needs to be able to update the price every time something is selected in the set by the customer.

Product combinations can actually do this. It's named "impact on price"

The only things I consider to be missing is:

• Make combinations from existing products, one has to enter these combinations in addition to the single product.
• Price impact has to be done manually, too. Probably needed with Magento as well, because I'd take that price impact on a combined product usually doesn't exactly match the price of the separate product. E.g., adding a $10 SD card to a $80 camera doesn't end up in a $90 combination (like Magento would do it), but gets priced $89.

Looks like it largely depends on how often you want such combined products. Also whether you actually intend to sell the combination add-ons separately.

To find out how well it works, one can only try. I think it's worth such a try.

[DaoKakao]

As it seems to me, there's not much need of magento-like functionality. This is more marketing question: - carry out ABC-analysis and derive or rank most profitable combinations - just generate appropriate combinations, and that's all!

Another plus (as it seems to me) of 'fixed', non-dynamic combinations is it's better SEO/search indexation.

[Guest]

That scenario with the configurable memory components is used quite a lot, the last three companies I've worked for have all needed it in some variation and they sold completely different product ranges (guitars & amps, kilts & accessories, and now industrial & commercial equipment). The first two companies I did Magento sites for them but the current company was on SellerDeck and moved to PrestaShop partly down to costs (SellerDeck is very expensive). PrestaShop is ridiculously basic in comparison to either of these platforms that provide the necessary functionality.

The best we can do is groups of non-combinaton products or standalone combination products but not groups of combination products. Also we can't do stock management on individual combinations nor list certain combinations as out of stock. There's myriad limitations on the combination system that Magento 1.x supports.

It's been requested in the feature request area for this bundles feature and I'm hoping it's something that comes in Thirty Bees 1.1.x. Magento 2 looks like a non-option as a lot of features you'd need, such as the quotes stuff seems to be ear-marked for the Enterprise Edition (or whatever they're calling it now) and not the Community 'open source' Edition.

@mak your best option is to stick with Magento 1.x for now until this feature becomes part of Thirty Bees.

The main draw of packs of combination products is allowing your customer to buy lots of different things that are relevant without having to leave the current page. People are lazy and upselling / cross-selling is far easier if they don't have to jump through hoops to buy the extra stuff.

[mak]

If there were not a need for the Magento like Product Bundle functionality, Magento would not have included it. Thats why for so long they have been the leader in ecommerce. The things everyone calls unnecessary, Magento actually sees the need for it. It doesn't really seem very hard to extend the current functionality of the Product Pack in Thirty Bees except that it might break backward compatibility with Prestashop. Don't know any other reason why that would not be on the to do list in a future release. Unfortunately I have to stick with Magento 1 until next year this time and hope that either Thirty Bees incorporates the Magento Product Bundle or Magento 2 becomes more stable and faster. As far as the quotes option that I need, I currently use cart2quote enterprise edition and it's compatible with Magento 2. I would much rather pay for the module developed by the devis prestashop developer. It costs 1/8th the price and includes everything the cart2quote enterprise edition does, not to mention I have to buy a separate plugin from them to be able to hide the price and add to cart button.

[DaoKakao]

Folks, your wishes of highly-dynamic-product-bundle-consists-of-dozens-of-items seems to me like a wish to organize an extra shopping cart inside the eshop.

Perhaps, i have not much of life experience, but i try not to forget the KISS principle. I remember the horror of SUN Microsystems' system configurator - it had tons of options affecting the price and other options, it was sooooo slooooow and extremely unstable. The result is - 'So long, Sun!' There's another HUGE issue specific to computer and/or electronics area: compatibility. If you give your customer a freedom to select some options, then you have to check it compatibility in some way. Then, bearing in mind said above, as it seems to me, the usefullness of such functionality like a 'bundles' is vely low, speaking in terms of MONEY OUTCOME, while the price of such functionality is quite high. Just take a look to the market leaders: they offer a lot of limited, fixed(almost) variations, which are the source of most sales. And something 'custom' is sold different way.

So, as it seems to me it is possible to get good sales/cross-sales similar to Magento's 'bundles' thru not only combinations, but also with product packs combined with 'related products'.

[mak]

It seems more fitting to compare SUN Microsystems and PrestaShop. That seems to be closer to the route they took before they went downhill.

I see the solution that is available in Thirty Bees and it is similar when using combinations under Standard Products. This process is not the same however as the Magento Bundle Products. After messing around with it more, I see that the Product Pack is not the correct solution. There needs to be a search feature just like the Product Pack has so we don't have to go through the process of adding the SKU individually after picking the attributes. Not really sure why it forces 1 reference number rather than allowing you to either type out the individual SKU or select from a list for each individual product in the attribute set. It is useless to only allow the attribute names to be generated with 1 SKU for the entire product bundle.

Currently, I can only add 1 Product Reference to each set of generated combination of products. That does me no good. If I could at least add the SKU of each product to the generated combination of products, I could possibly use csv to make my lists and import, but the single Reference code is useless. How am I supposed to know which of my thousands of products go to which computer?

With Magento: Back end - you make an attribute (like CPU) -> add multiple products by selecting from a list with a checkbox; add another attribute (like Memory) -> add multiple products by selecting from a list with a checkbox, etc., etc. all from the same place and then click save.

Front end - customer goes to product page and selects 1 product from each attribute set under that particular product and the price gets adjusted and the SKU for all the products (not just a single SKU as a set) that were selected in each attribute is also sent in the backend to my email so that I know which products to include in the bundle.

Also, (and this is not an attack on you) you can't deny progress just because you are afraid it will break something. I get it, it takes work, it takes testing, it requires time and money. Nobody is saying give it to me now. Also, if someone could make a module for that, I would buy it. Maybe there is a solution like what I am looking for and I don't see it. Time is money and no one that uses the Magento Bundle will think otherwise and will just move on to another solution or just stick with Magento.

[DaoKakao]

@mak said in Product Bundle feature like Magento:

It seems more fitting to compare SUN Microsystems and PrestaShop. That seems to be closer to the route they took before they went downhill.

To bark on the dead lion isn't a worthy business. But PS isn't dead, and have enough power yet, although even being in trouble, IMHO

As for remain - i won't even try to discuss something. I just tried to express my opinion, that TB have all needed to implement very similar mechanics. So, if you want to have a pure magento clone - it's your choise.

Just a small note on 'progress' - recent history shows, that really progressive products won't survive on the market. Rather, only optimal in terms of costs and minimal usefulness survives. Just remember the stories of Motorola, IBM, Fujitsu, Sony, et c.

[mak]

I'm not trying to cause an argument with you and again, I'm sorry if it comes across that way. I'm giving you the point of view of someone who is using Magento. How is what I'm asking for "a pure magento clone"? The functionality of Thirty Bees is almost complete except for the way it allows Product Combinations to be made. Currently, there is no way for me to add my products with their sku's to a Product Combination because it only allows that in Product Packs and that is not the same functionality as a Product Combination.

Also, you keep telling me that Thirty Bees has similar mechanics - I am asking for help because I don't see those similarities except to be able to add words to a attribute set and set those in a Product Combination with a single SKU. If I'm missing something please tell me. I have even tried to add the attribute values separately with separate SKUs and it doesn't allow that; this is the front end message: "This combination does not exist for this product. Please select another combination."

[Guest]

It might be easier to explain this with an example:

Product A has combinations Alpha, Beta, Charlie, each of these 3 has say 4 selections Product B has combinations Delta, Echo, each of these 2 has 4 selections Product C has combinations Foxtrot, Golf, each of these 2 has 3 selections

I want to buy 2 of product A with Beta selection 3, and 3 of Product B with Delta selection 1, and 1 of Product C with Golf selection 2

In the current setup I'd have to visit 3 pages to do this but with the bundles of combination products I should be able to do it all from 1 page and as I select each combination and quantity it should auto-update the price.

Now extend this to the idea of 1 main configurable product with say 20 additional products I can buy at the same time (all configurable - sizes 1', 2', 3' etc) and by buying these extra components with the main product I can get discounts on the overall purchase. In addition I might want to buy any one of these 20 products on their own; I may have bought the main product awhile back and now decide I want to buy spare parts at a later date.

This is a very common scenario, it's not specialist. As it stands now many of our customers find it easier to pick up the phone and talk to one of our sales guys because they get frustrated with using the website and going to each and every one product. At the end of the day the issue isn't how complicated the software is, it's how easy it should be for the customer to buy from the website.

[DaoKakao]

@davidp said in Product Bundle feature like Magento:

This is a very common scenario, it’s not specialist. As it stands now many of our customers find it easier to pick up the phone and talk to one of our sales guys because they get frustrated with using the website and going to each and every one product. At the end of the day the issue isn’t how complicated the software is, it’s how easy it should be for the customer to buy from the website.

This is exactly what i'm talking about. If you give a million of choises for client then he/she inevitably will be frustrated, independently of how deep you've authomated your ecommerce site. And he/she definitely will call a manager for help with choise. I've noted that the grand's sites doesn't give much choises to clients - usually there's a quite few promotions with in most cases fixed configuration/feature selection and very small number of options.

I mentioned Sun Microsystems above as a bright example: they gave access to the configurator only to those customers, who obtained a specific courses and passed an exam - i.e. definitely having enough knowledge to make a choise. And even in that case, when i've configured some configurations, i had to call Sun's managers to verify my order.

[Guest]

@daokakao I think you're missing the point. The complexity is because they're having to jump to various pages because they can't do it all on one page.

If you're buying a custom built computer you want to be able to select your memory, cpu, graphics card, motherboard, case all from the same page. You don't want to add the memory then go looking for the cpu then the graphics card, then the motherboard...oh wait can I use that motherboard with that cpu and does that graphic card fit the motherboard I want... You're adding in the complexity by not offering it to them all at one.

Sure you can offer pre-made bundles that they can 'click and buy' but if you're catering to a specific custom built market that's what they want, 'click, click, click ... buy' not 'click, navigate, click, navigate, click...buy'. The trick is to offer multiple methods including simple products, bundles and custom bundles to cater to all types of customers.

[DaoKakao]

@davidp said in Product Bundle feature like Magento:

Sure you can offer pre-made bundles that they can ‘click and buy’ but if you’re catering to a specific custom built market that’s what they want, ‘click, click, click … buy’ not ‘click, navigate, click, navigate, click…buy’. The trick is to offer multiple methods including simple products, bundles and custom bundles to cater to all types of customers.

You words just prove an idea that there's no general-purpose solution for custom built market. And you right, your point to offer multiple methods is exactly a trick. I stand that i have to use not tricks, but exact mathematical model of my business: what categories are belongs to "A" group from the ABC analysis, which of them belongs to "B" group and then to make a prepackaged offerings for those of my customers who'll bring me 90% of earnings. For remains i'll offer my personal assistance with a great pleasure - this also will increase a confidency/loyalty level.

And you're 146% right describing an ideal aim of ecommerce - "click-and-buy". All sales coaches accents this simple think: the merchant's primary role is to make decisions for a client, and often instead of him/her

Let's see the such leaders as DELL, HP, IBM/Lenovo, Fujitsu, their reselers and others, and compared it. Most of them don't have something like magento bundles. Absolutely.

[Guest]

@daokakao you can't compare your business model or that of those big dealers with what I'm suggesting, they're in completely different markets. A perfect example of this is overclockers, such as: https://www.overclockers.co.uk/ocuk-tech-labs-haswell-e-x99-pro-gaming-pc-configurator-fs-003-tl.html

The people who buy those configurable items may not be interested in pre-packaged deals from those companies, that's why they shop at the likes of overclockers and not Dell.

It comes down entirely to your own target audience and their needs and not what some big companies are doing.

My words don't prove there's no general solution at all. Bundles of configurable products is a need for many markets. The markets my company sells in are nothing to do with computers, we sell industrial equipment; some customers are fine with the same thing, some aren't and want to configure what they're getting.

With regards to the personal assistance side, your time is better spent selling to someone new rather than sorting out a sale you could have made from that customer via the website; you're wasting precious time on something that could have been automated. There's also the issue that some people don't contact you, they give up and go elsewhere to a company that can provide what they want.

[mak]

"Dell doesn't have something like magento bundles"? What exactly do you call this option on their entire site that gives you the choice of putting the products you want in a bundle -> click on system options: http://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/servers-storage-and-networking/poweredge-r730-rack-server/spd/poweredge-r730/per7301356_a This is identical to the Thirty Bees Product Combinations except that it is way more intuitive and useful.

This is exactly how my site operates and just so you know Dell's site is identical to magento bundles except that their solution goes a step further with logic. Even overclockers is the same way.

The point is: we need this option. Everyone knows this option doesn't exist in the rest of the ecommerce platforms and because of it they stick to something like magento.

[alexmorco]

Here you can go with: https://www.cloudways.com/blog/magento-2-bundle-products/