The Story
Part of the fascinating facts about working with SMBs is that you never know what kind of challenges lying ahead of you: no matter how much experience you’ve got, there’re always cases where you need to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. A client we recently worked with, has fallen in such category. Majority of this client’s products are assembled from different parts if we treat those products in the traditional way – listing all available options in stock management, then it will require this client to carry over a million dollar worth of stock. But in fact, most of the products are assembled on demand and there are good chances that some of the product variations may never sell. For all the above reasons, create all the possible custom product options is not the right way to operate this business online.
Challenges & Solutions
On one side, the main challenge is that we need an eCommerce platform capable of selling custom built products, which means customers can select the combinations of their choice in a few steps to make their own products; on the other, we still need accurate stock control to manage different parts and materials for inventory forecast and bookkeeping. These two demands have led us to rediscover a native feature of Magento – Bundled Product Type.
Out of the box, Magento offers products to be sold in a bundle with no limitations of many products to be bundled and how many options each product can have. Once a bundled product is sold, individual products’ inventory is adjusted accordingly. For this reason, Magento has become another winner of choice. It has resolved the challenges by allowing us:
- to sell any possible product variations without having them all in stock and preassembled
- to keep an accurate stock level of all parts and materials
Features At a Glance
- eCommerce store built on Magento 2.
- Payment options: PayPal, ZipPay, AfterPay and Credit Card.
- Integrated eCommerce and email marketing.
- Custom products – a customer can make their own products by selecting each individual parts and materials.
- POS and Inventory integration.
- eBay integration.
- Simplified checkout to reduce the chances of abandoned carts.
- Ajax Cart and Layered Navigation.
- Dedicated cloud hosting.
