Dynamic Pricing Frustrations

[koala]

Brennan, you are 100% correct sir! This is exactly what I'd love to see.

The issue is you could go and delete all of the variants and re-generate them, but if, let's say, you have 300 variants that are generated, but realistically only 40 of them are actually needed, it's a hell of a lot of work to delete the variants which are not applicable :)

[Brennan]

I understand what you saying, If you update prices a lot it is easier to updated them on the master product vs going into each variant. Maybe a button to "Regenerate Variant Prices" would be useful to solve this issue. The way it was designed, after variants were generated, any future price updates would be made at the variant level directly.

As for the setting when generating variants, this makes it so the variant prices are ignored and the master product price and its attributes are used for pricing, however this setting will not give you the ability to dynamically update the product price as you select different attributes.

[koala]

Which is why it'd be great if the variant price could actually be controlled by the master product + it's attributes. There is such an option when you go to generate variants, but selecting it, it does nothing.

[Brennan]

If you use inventory variants, when you generate variants Miva will take the base product price and add in any attribute prices and set the variant price correctly when variants are generated. If the price then changes either the base price or the attribute prices you would have to manually update the variant price.

[koala]

Hi Kevin,

Yes, you have to painfully go and update every variant when your price needs to be changed. If you try to generate variants and use the "use master product + it's attributes" - it doesn't work.

It's super frustrating :(

[lancermedia]

Would love an update on this as well. We are seeing the same using Levels. The dynamic pricing will only change on a non inventory tracked product if it doesn't have a Swatch attribute on it.

And to be clear, Miva really wants us to always use inventory variants for this? So if we did use inventory variants, the pricing boxes on the attributes config aren't used? You have to manually go into each inventory variant inactive product that was generated, add up the price choices for that combined generated product, and use that as the variants price?

The current store I'm working on sells glasses. One of the attributes is frame color. We really want to use swatches and image machine to swap out the color images. Seems like the way Miva has this setup, you can do both - use image machine AND use dynamic pricing?

-Kevin

[inger]

I have a problem related to this. In the development store I'm working on we have a lot of products that come in just one size, colour, shape or whatever. I would think that there is no needs for using attributes. But the price next to the product does not update dynamically if someone wants to buy 2 or 3 or several of the same product. Miva support told me, when I called them, that this is correct, but it would be possible to edit the file scripts.js to enable the dynamical update. I'm not that much js savvy, is there anyone out there who could help?

As to the swatches radio buttons: I tried it, and as people here also found, it didn't work as to updating prices. I changed it to regular radio buttons without removing the swatches, and it works fine. The swatches are still to be seen, but not as pretty as it was with the swatches radio buttons.

Inger, Norway

[koala]

Has there been any progress on this? We've really hit a bit of a wall in the development of our new Miva site.

[koala]

Thanks Brennan. I'm happy to hire Miva to do the changes if needed, but I was hoping there might be a simple way to just get it to work.

inventory variants are fantastic for our products when we want to filter one attribute based on another (ie: correct sized box spring for the selected mattress size). But if you have two or three attributes and there are zero dependencies, it's really not a needed feature for us.

[Brennan]

Normally in order to get the price to change automatically based on the attribute selected you must use inventory variants. This is the only method miva supports by default. There are some use cases where you don't want inventory variants for whatever reason.

Because of that in a few of the readythemes (suivant, optics, iron & wool, coustic and levels) we added custom javascript specific to those themes which will do this price change for you without inventory variants. This is why it is working for you on some products even though do you don't have variants.

I'll check and see why it does not work with swatches but it may need to be customized to support those.

[koala]

I know Brennen will have a more accurate and detailed explanation, but I believe the problem is the data and structure of the data produced by the built in image swap is not compatible with the dynamic attribute pricing. I believe you least frustrating answer to this would be a custom solution for image swap that works with the built in Dynamic Attribute Pricing or a new DAP function.

You may very well be 100% right on this. It's kind of unfortunate as I just "assumed" it would work. This was one of the main reasons we were finally ditching MMUI. I'm building swatch arrays manually in our current live website and it's a total PITA :)

[koala]

How did you get the dynamic pricing to work without the inventory variants? I have a site that I have generated millions of variants just to make the dynamic pricing work.

It just worked out of the box. I didn't have to change or modify anything. This is why I think there is something amiss specifically with the swatch drop down. Unfortunately my knowledge of javascript is too basic to likely figure it out on my own.

As an aside - how enjoyable is it using the autocomplete search feature in the admin when you have so many variants? I could see this being a total nightmare.

[lesliekirk]

This is why I'm confused, though. If I have several drop down lists on a page, the dynamic price updates just fine. It's only specifically when a swatch drop down is in the mix, that this no longer works.

How did you get the dynamic pricing to work without the inventory variants? I have a site that I have generated millions of variants just to make the dynamic pricing work.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

I know Brennen will have a more accurate and detailed explanation, but I believe the problem is the data and structure of the data produced by the built in image swap is not compatible with the dynamic attribute pricing. I believe you least frustrating answer to this would be a custom solution for image swap that works with the built in Dynamic Attribute Pricing or a new DAP function.

[koala]

Thanks Rick. I'd love to find a solution to this. Variants are nice if you have, say, 5 colours and 3 sizes. But if you have 10 or 20 product sizes + 40 colours, the number of variants is insane and totally not necessary.