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.