Size-independent product lines
Size-independent product linesYou will have already seen from the article about your product lines that a product line is the unit that you rent. (if you sell online or if you use GBAL)
In other words, a product line is an interchangeable unit (commercially) that you sell
Let's take an easy example:
In your shop you have 20 tandems and 100 hybrid bikes.
When you rent a tandem its not the same thing as selling a mountain bike. Tandems cost more to rent for one thing.
This is why your product line knows about the type of product.
But what about size?
So if you take a booking for 4 hybrid bikes you'd better make sure they get 4 hybrid bikes.Now, normally when people take a reservation for 4 hybrid bikes they will know the sizes of the bikes being reserved (roughly):
- 2 x 17" Male
- 1 x 19" Male
- 1 x M Female
this is the default system setup. Your product lines are comprised of 3 elements (or dimensions)
- product line name - e.g. hybrid
- frame type - e.g. Male
- size - e.g. 19"
BUT sometimes your business is such that you want your product line to only contain 2 dimensions:
Then when you take an order, you can still distinguish between product type (and frame) but not size.
In this case its the same reservation, 4 hybrid bikes;
BUT crucially we have decided to NOT INCLUDE size as part of our product lines - we will sort that out when we have the customer in front of us - or at leat when we actually allocate bikes.
N.B. BRM still has bike size information, we have just decided not to include that information in the definition of our product lines:
You do this by using the SIZE2 column in your spreadsheet - and making sure that column is visible from the front-end.
e.g. when creating reservations
when viewing reservations