Product Configurator – Overview

Overview

Product Configurator is a powerful, scalable module for allowing customers to make complex purchases using a simple user interface. This is one of the more complex features to implement due to the data requirements that come with any configurator, but once implemented is a great way to present your products to clients. 

Think of each product configuration as a stand-alone form the user is submitting to order products. The Product Configurator allows the website owner to create custom questions and answers to display on a product. When a user answers these custom questions, backend logic and settings added by the site owner, determines the SKU’s and Qty of SKU’s to be added to the cart.

Site owners can do simple questions where the answer is a specific SKU that the customer is ordering or can implement custom JavaScript logic to do the calculations.

Use Cases

• You are an electrical company that sells custom wires to your customers.  You usually have accounts call in to provide information about the specs they need, or you send them a spec sheet with information to fill out.  Migrating over to our web-based configurator takes out the manual work involved with this, and allows your customers to input the data directly on your site and automatically import an order with all this information filled out already
• You sell expensive machinery that is configured to order.  You don’t want to manufacture these up front since they are expensive, the order volume is low, or each piece of equipment varies.  You need a way to gather information from your customer to cater the product towards their needs.

Data Structure

Products marked as configurations can either have questions mapped directly to them, and/or forms mapped to them.  Each method has their advantages:

• Questions mapped to configurator products
  • Allows unique questions per product configuration
• Forms mapped to configurator products
  • Allows a standard set of questions mapped to configurations, without having to continually setup the same questions on each product
  • Use case:
    • Products that are setup as gifts can have a form attached with a standard set of questions like “Is this a gift?”, “Include gift wrapping”, “Include gift message”

Forms mapped to Products

• Products, where use_config_sections = ‘1’
  • Forms
    •  Questions
      • Products Mapped to Questions
      • Answers
        • Products Mapped to Answers

Questions mapped to Products

• Products, where use_config_sections = ‘1’
  • Questions
    • Products Mapped to Questions
    • Answers
      • Products Mapped to Answers