Configurable products with reference to simple products

Question

I'm in the process of creating an e-commerce site for myself. I'm a Magento developer but decided to learn Drupal.

I'm struggling with a setup for configurable products. I'm able to create them in a way that each configurable parent has its variation, but it isn't what I need. I want the variations to be shared between configurable parents. The products I'll be offering in many cases will be sharing the base product with a custom design. So I want the parent product to be the design and the variation a base the customer can change. I have the stock module enabled and the plan is that when any of the variations becomes out of stock, it should become out of stock in the configurable product. If all variations are out of stock, all configurable products using them become out of stock saving a lot on admin.

Configurable Product 1      Configurable Product 2
        |                           |
  ---------------             ---------------
  | Variation A |             | Variation B |
  ---------------             ---------------
        |                           |
   ---------------------- Base Product ----------------------
   |       |       |       |       |       |       |       |
Simple  Simple  Simple  Simple  Simple  Simple  Simple  Simple
Prod 1  Prod 2  Prod 3  Prod 4  Prod 5  Prod 6  Prod 7  Prod 8

I checked the existing modules and couldn't find anything allowing it. I think it might be impossible without customization. The Kickstarter project doesn't demonstrate an example like this.

If any of you did something similar, could you please share how did you accomplish it?

Answer 1

There's not really enough information here to give you a complete solution, but the general way to handle configurable products that don't require unique SKUs is to use a custom order item type with fields added to it that you expose to the "Add to cart" form mode. In that case, the customer would add a variation to the cart and the order item would retain any input they provide, whether it's selecting an option (e.g., pick an image to have printed on your shirt), uploading a file (e.g., upload the image to print on a mug), etc.

How this works with your chosen stock solution will be up to you to figure out. The one issue with this feature is that because the fields are defined at the order item type level, and the order item type is correlated to product variations at the product variation type level, this means every Add to Cart form will have the same selection of configuration options. If you need them to vary from variation to variation, you're going to have to use custom code to make that happen.