Choosing best product type

Question

I'm creating a new Magento site for a client, and one of his requirements has me thinking. It makes sense from a business standpoint, but I'm not sure how to implement this in Magento.

Many of his products will be clothing that comes in different sizes and colors. In addition, custom logos can be added - such as embroidery or screen printing. The client wants the customer to be able to choose the color and imprint method as options, and to have a separate input box for each size. If it weren't for the multiple input boxes, I would set this up as a configurable product, with size and color as the configurable attributes and the imprint method and color as the custom options.

So does this need to be some sort of configurable grouped product? If so, how do I accomplish this? Is there some easier way to do this that I'm not aware of?

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Answer 1

From my experience it all comes down to

• "do you keep sperate SKUs and inventories for each sub-product?"
• "Do you have restrictions to the products' options"

If not go with custom options, as simple products for a configurable product with 2 or more attributes can be a pain to the db.

Let's imagine that you have a t-shirt which has 5 different sizes, 4 different colors and 2 imprint methods. These are 40 simple products, plus one configurable.

Now, if you are not keeping stock foreach of them or you do not have any restrictions like "XL does not come out in black" you can easily create 1 simple product with custom option and SKU notations