Product Family limitations
Saving product family information naturally overwrites the information in the products within the sets. However, there are instances when variants (members of the family) may have different settings. For example, one variant is a pendant, the other is for a pendant with a necklace; here the Short Description varies but saving the product family overwrites the Short Description in each product. This gets more serious when Drop-ship supplier or COGS accounts are changed. For example, while digital sales are very poorly implemented in DEAR, there should be some way of managing the sale of a Book and the same eBook. These are variants of the same product that have different Drop-ship suppliers and different Revenue and COGS accounts.
An easy solution to this is to recognise that variants may have different settings, and when they are different that DEAR display the field as "<multiple settings>" in grey. When the Family is saved, fields that remain greyed are not saved within the individual products, thus providing some safety.
One other point, is that Discounts are often assigned per Family not just per product, but the ability to assign Discounts to Families is absent. For example, if a wholesale customer is tagged, then you may wish to apply a discount to all variants of a shirt to the wholesale customer. Currently, this needs to be done per-product, or export and import a discount matrix.
Please also check this Feature request which as additional detail to the above request, but for some reason comments have been disabled: https://support.dearsystems.com/support/discussions/topics/11000025575
From my experience, all data fields in a Product Family override the corresponding field in the individual Products, except the following:
- SKU (obviously)
- Product name
- Prices (unless you allow it after saving the Family)
Whilst all fields can be changed at an individual product level after saving the Family, any subsequent changes made to the Family will again override these at individual product level.
We really need options available whether we wish to allow these Family fields to override at individual product level, esp basic functions like minimum before reorder - Not all variants sell at the same rate, therefore you don't want to hold the same amount of stock of each variant.
Would appreciate if some customisation was available here
Hello everyone!
As Daniel has mentioned, we have added an option for when a family is created and saved, the below pops up. Selecting the relevant choice will be save for your future edits as well.
As for descriptions, the family is basically meant for the same product with different variants. So the descriptions and other fields sync always after an edit.
Another aspect that is headache with the implementation of Families is the Unit of Measure for each product in the family. Especially when there is interaction between the Additional Units of Measure and Families.
Typical scenario goes like this: