Product parameters on add to cart form which not changing product variation

Question

I have a phisycal product with many many combinations. E.g.: a mug which is available in 20 different colors and with 30 different prints. This means 600 combinations. We don't have stock. We don't have different SKU for different color-print combinations. We don't have pictures for all combinations, prices are same etc so there is no reason why the 600 products should be upload one-by-one as 600 different commerce product variations.

I would like to handle this product as ONE single product (one SKU: one product in one product display) which have 2 special "parameters" show only in the add to cart form: color and print.

So a customer on the product page could choose these 2 parameters then add the product to a cart and these parameters are not not formed to product variations, the product variation is fixed.

In this case he add the one product to the cart and anywhere I shoud store his color and print choice in the cart item. But.. how? Is there any solution for this use-case? Can you hint some starting point for solving this task?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is a common use case in Commerce, and as you've suggested, it's resolved not by using a single variation per combination but through custom fields added to your line item type exposed on the Add to Cart form mode.

Your primary challenge will be determining which options should be available for which product, as in the case of a particular mug not being available in certain colors. If you don't have that use case, no worries, but if you do, I've suggested folks in the past add a field for the various options to the product itself and write custom code to alter the Add to Cart form to filter available options based on that product field.