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:
We have a number of product families where the smaller sizes are Zero VAT and the larger sizes are 20% VAT. So far this hasn't been too much of an issue for us, but it would be great if you could update this option at the Product Family stage. Rather than having to go back into each product individually after creating the family and updating them manually.
Actually, we're finding that the VAT rates are more of an issue than first thought. Especially if we need to change something such as the price or description of the product family. You then have to go back into each variant and change the VAT again and then re-list the product in Shopify. It's much more of a long-winded process than we were expecting.
This is also an issue for us, mostly the fields
- Minimum Before Reorder
- Reorder Quantity
We have many families with 10-100's of variations of colour per family, and we need different reorder points per individual products/colours. Every time we update something on the family, ie price, tag, description we need to export all our products and redo all our 1000's of reorder points... it's unworkable.
I would have thought if those fields were empty (not 0 or any other number) in the family it might not update the individual products, but even that wipes all the individual products to 0 in both fields.
This causes many headaches for us, specifically the fields
- Minimum Before Reorder
- Reorder Quantity
We have many family products with 10-100's of colour variations. Each variation needs to have separate reorder quantities (some colours are more popular than others). Every time we update price, tags, description etc in the family our reorder points on variations are stripped which makes a lot of work everytime we need to make a purchase order. I was hoping just be leaving those values blank in the family it might not update, but it changes the variations to 0.
This causes many headaches for us, specifically the fields
- Minimum Before Reorder
- Reorder Quantity
We have many family products with 10-100's of colour variations. Each variation needs to have separate reorder quantities (some colours are more popular than others). Every time we update price, tags, description etc in the family our reorder points on variations are stripped which makes a lot of work everytime we need to make a purchase order. I was hoping just be leaving those values blank in the family it might not update, but it changes the variations to 0.
The normal user interface model for this scenario would display <various> as the value for any values that differ on the individual products. If you leave the value as "<various>" when you save then they stay at the various individual values, if you enter a specific value into that field then it overwrites all the individual values.
Hello All,
The current product family module does not display UPC code field. I believe by implementing an extra field to edit/modify UPC code in product family could save users tons of time, especially for apparel items which contains a lot of sizes and colors. This could enable the team to work more efficiently when reviewing the product information and creating products to sales channels. Currently, we do have to click into each product to view the UPC code. By downloading an excel file doesn't address this issue, because excel will automatically change the UPC code to general text instead of plain numbers and doesn't display the full length of the UPC code every time we download the excel file, which is very time consuming. Hope this advice could be taken by DEAR team. Thank you!
Sincerely,
I agree with all of the above comments. It is a maintenance overhead we could do without having to re-update the product variants every time we make a small amendment to the product family record - for example, adding or removing images if a supplier rebrands the product. We too have variances in minimum before reorder and reorder quantities for product variants - they come in different pack sizes based on the size of the product. We also have different short descriptions for individual products defining product sizes.
This area definitely needs reviewing and a more refined design/solution developing.
@Angelo Li
Agreed that a Barcode field display could be useful in the product family view. It let's us edit weights and dimensions already. Perhaps we could have a column for UOM and UPC added in that table.
Regarding UPC codes in Excel, this is CSV/Excel problem and not specific to Dear. It is a indeed a frustration to correct for every import, but is not actually difficult to do, you just have to remember to do it every time. Fix the barcodes like this: