Dynamic Pricing Frustrations

[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]

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]

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]

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 met with our development team today. We are going to be adding this feature into 9.0007.

[koala]

Thank you Brennan, that would be incredible! If they could ensure it doesn't re-generate any variants which have been deleted, that'd be critical too.

[lesliekirk]

If they could ensure it doesn't re-generate any variants which have been deleted, that'd be critical too.

Oh yeah....especially when you are dealing with millions of them....

[koala]

Oh yeah....especially when you are dealing with millions of them....

I shudder to think about millions of variants. We have something like 10,000 and even that seems extreme to me!

[lancermedia]

The way it's working now means that if you are using Color Swatches, the price in the attribute itself is only used the first time inventory variants are generated. Anything after that, it doesn't care what's in the attribute - it's just for show in the dropdown. So is what you are saying Brennan is that in 9.0007 you will add a new button that would allow us to change the price of the master product and/or variant options and click a button to "Regenerate Variant Pricing" - meaning it would re-run the pricing calculations on all variants, without needed to delete them?

-Kevin

[Brennan]

Yes that is how that new button will work.

You can updated variant prices now, but it has to be done individually at the variant level, either though the admin or via csv import.

[lancermedia]

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.

Brennan, thanks for the info. Also - were you able to find out why dynamic pricing doesn't work if you have color swatches, yet it works with dropdowns?

-Kevin

[koala]

Brennan,

Did this make its way into 9.7? I can't seem to identify any changes or new options.

[d2d2d2]

Also running into problems with this. Will there be any updates in future versions? We are a higher-end furniture with so many custom covering options offered at many price variants. So many of our fabric/leather offerings might never be ordered and I hate the idea of having to maintain pricing at the variant level. There is just me doing website pricing maintenance. I have taken up adding javascript swatches in a tab below the main product info and then using drop-down menus. It would be great if I could use the swatch drop-down menu with pricing? What are Miva's future plans/goals for this feature?

[koala]

Any updates? We're so unbelievably frustrated by how price variants work currently.

I'm with d2d2d2, being in the mattress/furniture industry, there are so many variants that may never be ordered, but they need to be in the variants to provide complete pricing to our customers.

[Brennan]

The ability to reprice the variant prices from the master product is currently in testing. Right now it is slated for Miva 10, however we may be able to get it into our summer release. Attached is a screenshot. It essentially allows you update the base price and the attributes and click a button and Miva will automatically update the prices of all variants.

That being said, if you're not using variants, and just are looking for the price to update as they change attributes, its possible to add some custom JavaScript to do this for you now.