euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

If you have product catalog that contains many articles with many variants, or variant-combinations, it may be necessary to set the parent-product as non-buyable, because only variants can be purchased.  Classical example, a t-shirt in different colors and sizes.  Unless a color and size is not selected, the product cannot be purchased!

OXID offers a configuration-setting for this purpose which would allow the shop-merchant to set up products with variants as non-purchases.  This setting is applicable shop-wide, and can be found under Master Settings > Core Settings > System > Variants > “Parent” Products can be purchased.

For more on OXID Variants, please also see Setting up Product Variants in OXID.

Variants contains different type of articles. Many products often require the same variants to be set up.

It would be very time-consuming to set up these variants for each product in OXID eshop.  For example if we take shoes as an article, we can assign different variants for this product based on the size and color of a shoe.

Defining the variants in OXID /admin

• Select Administer Products -> Products.
• Select the product for which you want to set up Variants.
• Select the Variants tab.
• All Selection Lists that have been set up in eShop are displayed on the left.
• Select the Color | Size Selection List.

Click the arrow ==>

The Variants will be set up automatically for each entry in the selection list.

Now, you only have to activate the variant, enter any other prices and enter the stock inventory.

In this way, you can quickly set up variants. If you have a few products with the same variants, this method will save you a lot of time.

Variant Dimensions

For example “Color” and “Size” are known as Variant-Dimensions

You can specify variant-dimensions for a set of variants using selection lists:

• In Name of Selection, you can specify a name for the dimension between the various variants, e.g. Color or Size.

Configuring Variants

• Each Variant can get it’s own Product-Number
  • If you do not enter a product number, the product number of the parent product will be used, and a suffix-counter added.
• Prices of Variants can be configured individually
• Variant order can be sorted, in order to influence the order of listing variants.  On the front-end, variants are listed in ascending order.
• Individual stock values can be maintained for specific variants.

Example for Variants

Different sizes:

The following example describes step by step how to set up variants for a product. Three variants will be set up: For ex. T-shirt sizes S, M and L etc.. All sizes cost $ 39.99. A total of 10 items in size S are in stock, and 25 items each in sizes M and L.

• Select Administer Products -> Products
• Select the product for which you want to set up variants.
• Select the Variants tab.
• In Name of Selection, enter Size.
• Click Save Selection.
• Next, the S variant will be set up. Make the following settings:
• In Selection, enter S.
  • In Price, enter 39.99.
  • In Sort, enter 0.
  • In Stock, enter 10. (Depends on the stock availability)
• Click New Variant.  The variant is saved and displayed.
• In Selection, enter M.
  • In Price, enter 39.99.
  • In Sort, enter 1.
  • In Stock, enter 25. (Depends on the stock availability)
• Click New Variant. The variant is saved and displayed.
• In Selection, enter L.
  • In Price, enter 39.99.
  • In Sort, enter 2.
  • In Stock, enter 25. . (Depends on the stock availability)

Click New Variant. The variant is saved and displayed.

All 3 variants are set up, but are not yet active:

Select the Active check box for all 3 variants.  Click Save Variants. The variants are now set up!

OXID e-Sales software provides an extremely advanced mechanism to enchange core products using the concept of Variants.  While a whole chapter can be written about use of Variants in OXID and their general implication on shop-owner’s bottom-line, this blog-post simply shows how to make a “Parent” article purchasable/non-purchasable.

In order to set the Purchasable/non-Purchasable status of Parent Products (with Variants contained within them), set:
Master Settings > Core Settings > System > Variants > “Parent” Products can be purchased on/off.

Itratos from Bamberg has done a great job with coming up with a Migration-Script for shops moving from xt:commerce shop software to OXID (currently version 4.2).

Command Line (CLI) and Web-based Script

Two variants of the script are available, each for a web-browser based invocation and a command-line (CLI) invocation.  We used CLI method.

console@host:~/xtc2oxidmodule$ php xtc2oxid_commandline.php &

Skip the & at the end of the command if you wish to see the live output on the console, else the command will run in the background.  For the first time you run the script, it isn’t a bad idea to view the live output on the console.

Glitches

A few initial glitches had to be overcome, primarily because the PHP CLI binary on the migration machine was of PHP4, which rendered calls to native OXID classes unsuccessful.  Replacing the php4-cli package from our Debian 5.0 Lenny machine with php5-cli fixed the problem.  Remarks in this post pertain to the CLI-method.

Variables related to the migration environment, such as paths of the existing xt:commerce shop, the target OXID shop, database settings etc. are stored in a handy _config.php, placed in the same directory as the xtc2oxid_commandline.php script.

Types of Data Migrated

• Customer/Buyer data with all addresses
• Products, including pictures and variants
• Categories
• Manufacturers
• Orders
• Newsletter and newsletter-subscribers

User Data

User-data (shop buyers) is migrated as well.  However it is required that users are informed of new passwords, since the database storage encryption is different in xt:commerce and OXID (uses md5).

About euroblaze’s OXID Migration Services

euroblaze provides migration-services for OXID Shops.  We migrate other shops systems (such as xt:commerce) to OXID e-Sales, or older versions of OXID (OXID-2, OXID-3, OXID Mietshop/SaaS), to  newer versions.