Hi, currently messing around with our trial version and have a question on best practices for item creation.
Can variants have different barcodes, quantities, pricing?
For example if we sell a product:
Snack Bar*
The snack bar comes in 5 flavors. We sell it in individual bars, and also in boxes. We also sell trade (but only in boxes). And it’s purchased only in boxes.
Would this be better setup as separate products or variants? And would variants be maybe just the case size they’re sold in or flavor also?
You can do either one; best to maybe try both and see which you prefer. Using the variant feature actually does setup individual products, so you can customize most properties (images, prices, etc) for each variant. You can also specify which variant template properties to copy to the individual variants by using the Item Variant Settings screen.
As far as the boxes, there are a few ways to go about it:
Completely different items, if you always keep them together in the boxes and want to more easily track stock for how many boxes of each flavor you have. You can also price the boxes differently vs. each bar. The disadvantage is then you can’t easily report on all your chocolate bars together (both loose and packaged) without some report tweaking, since they’re different stock items. But maybe you don’t need to.
Use a package as a unit of measure, e.g. a “box of 20” is a unit of measure that is 20 x single units. That allows easy conversion between packed and unpacked bars, but then if you want to know how many assembled boxes you have vs. individual bars, it’s problematic. This method would be more useful for packing bars together when they’re sold. From an accounting standpoint, it would track sales in the default uom only (single bars).
Create an Item Bundle for your packaged bars, which has most of the advantages/disadvantages of #2.
Thank you for your reply, very clear. If I were to use option 2 or 3 would we be able to have the barcodes/pricing options still?
Because in our retail stores they will open boxes all the time to sell so really keeping track of how many bars we have total (whether boxed or not) is the most important thing. It’s just that when selling them wholesale we only sell in cases so that seems a little trickier.