Microsoft Office Live Small Business Community

I am very pleased to announce that Store Manager now supports product variations. With product variations you can create a product and specify various colors, or sizes, or whatever.

How does it work?

When creating or editing a product, about half way down the page you'll see a 'Yes/No' radio button called 'Product variations'. When you select 'yes', fields will appear where you can specify the variations and their associated prices. When you view the product on your store, variations will appear as a drop-down box on your product details pages. Customer can select the variation they wish to purchase before adding the item to the cart

I realize how important this feature is to a lot of you guys and am very happy that it's finally been released. Once you've had a chance to play around with it I'd love to get your feedback. Feel free to reply to this post of send me a private message.

Cheers!

- Mike

It seems that this option supports specific variations.  However, it doesn't appear to support my need to allow the buyer to enter variable information.  Specifically, since I am selling "personalized" products, I need the buyer to enter their NAME to be printed on the product they are purchasing.  Is there some way to integrate this type of product variation?  This is critical to my being able to use this product, so I would appreciate any help anyone can offer.

Thanks

You are correct. At this point we do not support the notion of creating a variation where the user can free-form text. Although probably not ideal, as a workaround there is a text box on the last step of checkout where the user can enter in notes. Perhaps on the product details page you can instruct the user to enter the requested information in to this text box. These notes will be appended to the order and you will see them on the order detail page within your Store Manager account. Hope this helps.

- Mike

Very glad to see the 'variations' feature come in.  But disappointed that only one variation type was offered for an item.  Why limit the feature to one type of variable aspect?  It would be nice if there was an option to add additional variable types/choices to the item.  Like the 'add variable' button.  

Most of my items have at least 2 choices necessary, and some have 3 or 4 choices to make.   (horse training stick choices to make:   stick color, grip color, rope/string color, etc)       I would think 2 choices types are a minimum for most variable choice items for anyone.  Such as clothing for example....  it would be typical to need to choose size and color both.

Hopefully, the ability to have more than one variable type is coming? 

thanks Tami

 How do you do more than one product variation? I need to ask color and size.

Is there a way to have the price lower as they purchase more items? For myself I need the item to cost on price if they order just one of the item and become a different price if they buy 3, a different price if they buy 6, ect. This is their incentive to buy more. 

To support more than one variation... combine them. For example, lets say the product you are selling is a shirt and it comes in multiple sizes and colors. When specifying the details for the variations, enter then as follows:

• Large\Red
• Large\Blue
• Large\Green
• Medium\Red
• Medium\Blue
• etc...

In your store this will appear as a single drop-down menu where the shopper can choose the size/color with one click. This is similar to how most of the shopping sites implement this in their store.

For more details and screen shots check out our blog post on product variations.

In regards to volume discounting, we do not support that at this time.

Cheers!

- Mike

In the past we had a website and online store thru another provider. We weren't very happy with the website part but were very happy with the online store part. See have since left them and are now using you guys. I have been very please until today when I hit a VERY LARGE obstacle. We have spent the week getting the website just right and am now working on the online store part. I was entering product information and tried entering the variable information for several products. We make handcrafted soap products which come in the customers choice of fragrance (26 of them) and color (8 of them) added to ANY AND ALL products. And for bar soaps they can choose fragrance, color and bar soap mold style (10 of them). It would be impossible the list all combonations using your "fix" above. If I request our customers to use the text box to list fragrances and colors and mold type at the end of the transaction people are not going to remember all variations that are available to them. Some/most will not even remember to this upon checking out. This will lead to us making endless calls to to purchaser as to the specifics of each product they are purchasing. Also the different type of bar soap molds vary greatly in weight which leads to varying in price which needs to be decided upon checkout not in a phone call after. I need there to be at least 3 variable choices to be able to use your product. I have put so much time into it to want to start over with another provider. This is what I will have to do though without the proper options. Your service is geared toward small business and you would suspect that based on forum blogs and requests that this issue would have become apperent quite quickly.

Tip: With our last provider we found it very helpful that they gave the option to add a variation that could be enterd once but used multiple times. Your client (us) gave the variation a name like "fragrance." all fragrance were then listed seperately as fragrance variations. Then another variation was added like "color ." All colors were added. Then when a product was added we had the option the add a previously created variation like "fragranace" and/or "color" and did not have to retype these variations with their specifics for each product. We could also add a new variation not previously setup and were given the option to save it as a new variation. THe flexiblity of the variations was a must to sell our products.

Leslie   http://www.soapcrop.com

Wow, I thought nobody would answer me at all, I just posted about this this morning! That is great, it will sure help a lot! Thanks so much!

 Alex

www.alexsphotoart.com

Hello Alex. I'm not your help...sorry. I'm just another Office Live Small Business user with the same problem as you. I need help too.