Shopping cart with parts inventory

Or other solution

[ergophobe]

So I'm looking to build a shop for an assembler whose products consist of parts and parts of parts and builds these products on the fly as ordered.

Fictional example:

a car kit consists of an engine, body and four wheels. Each wheel consists of a rim and a tire.

Customers can only buy cars, but I want a car to consist of
- body
- engine
- 4 wheel kits, each consisting of a tire and a rim.

When I sell a car, I want the inventory control to decrement one body, one engine, four rims and four tires.


So I need to be able to have products that consist of parts assemblies, some of which are assemblies or assemblies and have these inventoried separately.

A product becomes unavailable when the parts for it are gone. There's no inventory for the product itself, per se (except if the customer is, in fact, buying one of the fundamental parts, like replacement tires).

I have as yet not found a shopping cart that does this.

There might be other options, like something that triggers an action in a separate inventory control system that integrates with the public-facing cart.

So far, this is a dealbreaker on the cart systems I've looked at.

[lorax]

Have you looked into X-Cart and the X-Configurator add-on module?

[ergophobe]

I had a look at that in the meantime. So far what I've found.


X-Cart with the Configurator add-on

Very promising, though quite complex clicking around through many screens to set up a product. It took me forever to figure my way around it and this is for a client, so I think it's tough right there.

The bigger problem I had is that it assumes you want client-configurable products, so you have Steps that then have Slots. You can disable a slot and set a default product, but it still provides a Configure button and you still have to go through Step 1, even though there are no choices. When it's all said and done, you still have a Clear Slots option.

Also, you can't do bundles of bundles, which would really be necessary.

It might be possible to work around that, but it would definitely be a kludge


Ubercart with Product Kits
Again, close but not quite. It's simpler to set up, but you still can't do kits of kits. Unlike X-Configurator, it doesn't have a nice a hierarchical selector system for adding constituent parts. You'd end up with a giant select list of all parts I think and have to select 25 of them. Could work. I'll try a mock up and ask him.

MRP Integration

I think that's what he needs - Manufacturing Resource Planning sfotware -and he simply is not going to find it in a shopping cart.

There are some, I think that integrate with Quickbooks, and he wants the cart to integrate with Quickbooks anyway, so it's looking like the best bet is to build out from Quickbooks and not try to find a shopping cart that can run the entire system from materials procurement to order fulfillment. I think it's just too big a task.

[rocknbil]

There are some, I think that integrate with Quickbooks

You might want to look at this very closely before making the jump, and here is why. It may be different in other versions but . . .

Scenario: custom built cart that manages product inventory perfectly. Wanted to integrate with QB, full blown retail edition.

Managed to get the data downloaded to the IIF files, get it imported to QB but totally failed on at least three major points.

The first is that in QB, you have an "Items list." The "Items list" consists of various account items, some examples are bank accounts, billing items (ex: types of billable items, etc.) and other "items" tied to your company. On import of the IIF files, the entire inventory dumped into the general items list. I found this absolutely ridiculous, I must be making a mistake, for a retail edition program not to have a list dedicated to store inventory. So I manually added an item and sure enough, it dumped it into the items list.

OK, let's try to make it work. Second problem: these products have many variations of sub options. AES1234 is a dress, for example, it comes in 6 colors with two variations of trim. But it's one item with options. QB has no way of dealing with it that way, the only way to "get it in" is to add it as 12 unique items, further bloating the items list.

Ok, let's forge onward . . . when you manually adjust inventory in QB, it affects various other account areas. When an item is sold or added, it not only increments/decrements the inventory, it adjusts the money in/money out accounts. I worked on this for about a month, and found no way to automate these account adjustments when importing site data to update inventory.

The whole thing is hinky, and cost us (I think) $700+. So now we just add sales to "daily cash" in QB (it's named something like that) and let the site do what it does 10x better than QB. We added inventory reporting to the site, and it's a much easier way to track inventory.

To address the original question, I found no solution that gracefully managed inventory, like you are looking for (but doesn't mean it's not out there.) Like your situation, this project required very special options that can be named "anything" at any time, required grouping of items in some cases, had various other variable requirements, and the inventory had to keep track of it everywhere - which also affected how the public pages displayed. I had to code it myself, which is where you may need to go, custom.

[Propools]

Have you considered having a custom cart made to handle all of the kits and kits within kits you're talking about? That's what we did for our site re-config some years ago.

This then can be set up to bolt onto any of the existing programs being used.

[ergophobe]

Thanks guys, that is really helpful.

Rocknbil - I was thinking of the current version of Quickbooks Premier which advertises itself as having "Manufacturing" features such as Bill of Materials management. Do you think that would still be a problem?

Also, I was planning to connect the cart and Quickbooks using Webgility which manages quantities of products and, for some carts variants of products (this is another issue I haven't raised here yet... oh sigh).

[rocknbil]

I don't know, we are pretty frustrated with QB which is why we never upgraded from that point. Much of what the product was advertised as fell short, they may have fixed some things, maybe not. It would be nice if they had a working demo, they didn't in '08, but if they do now it would answer a lot of questions. Maybe that's why they don't . . .

[ergophobe]

We found someone with a very similar business who is using a recent version of Quickbooks Premier, Manufacturing Edition, and not asking the shopping cart to do this. As I understand it, only the Manufacturing Edition and Enterprise Edition has this ability, so I'm hoping it works better than your experience.

I did, by the way, copy him on your comments, so he's forewarned of that too.

So for now, we'll do a prototype with some dummy products and see if we can get the three components working together (QB, cart, and bridge).