The ability to manage product variations in a practical manner separates the serious shopping cart plugins from fly-by-night carts. Surprisingly, though, most of the plugins covered handle product variations pretty well. But Shopp is best in this category. It uses ajax to allow you to add variations conveniently while you’re adding your product and overall it has great product variation management abilities.
You can click on the name of the product below to view its full review.
Shopp
Shopp‘s ability to handle product variations is above and beyond all other shopping cart plugins. It creates different versions of the same product depending on how many variations you have for it. You can create as many product variations as you want, and specify a price, inventory count, sale price, and shipping fee for each variation. The Shopp admin provides an inline variant editor so that you can enter products with a completely uninterrupted workflow. If you still want the advantages of setting up your variant attribute sets ahead of time to speed up data entry, you can do that using category template.
One of the useful and time saving features of variants is ‘Linking’. Linking variants makes your workflow faster by allowing you to more rapidly enter pricing information for lots of similar variants. When you make changes to a variant price editor that is linked to other variants, the changes are copied to all of the other linked variants at the same time. This is helpful when editing a product with a large amount of variants.
In addition to variations, you can also specify products with add-ons in Shopp. Add-ons are extra customization and configurations that are made-to-order.
Cart66
Cart66 supports product variations. I'll copy what's said about product variations in the user manual. It's pretty useful.
"Cart66 let's you specify product variations. So if you are selling t-shirts you customers
can select what size and color they would like using drop down menus on your website.
You can even specify product options that change the price of the product. For example,
if you are selling t-shirts, you may want to charge and extra $2.00 of the XXL size. Or
perhaps, you are selling headphones and you want to reduce the normal price of a set
of headphones by $10.00 because you have an open box or refurbished set of
headphones. You can specify up to two groups of product options with as many options
in each group as you like.
Suppose you are selling t-shirts that cost $15 each and you offer small, medium, large,
and extra large sizes. You want to charge an extra $2.00 for the extra large size. You
also have both white and navy blue colors. Cart66 has two product option group fields
for you to list these product variations. You would enter them as follows:
Option Group 1: Size: S, Size: M, Size: L, Size: XL +$2.00
Option Group 2: Color: White, Color: Navy Blue
After specify these options, you will get a product button that looks like this:
The product options are simply typed in and separated by commas. Notice that all you
have to do to change the price of a product is add a plus sign followed by a dollar
amount. If you want to decrease the price of your product, such as with the refurbished
option, you simply add a minus sign followed by the dollar amount by which you want to
reduce the price.
Suppose you were selling headphones and wanted to have the option for your
customers to buy either new or refurbished headphones. You could specify those
options as follows:
Option Group 1: New, Refurbished -$10.00
After specifying these options, you will get a product button that looks like this:"
GetShopped (WP e-Commerce)
Like all recent ecommerce plugins, GetShopped has the ability to add product variations. Variations allows store owners to add options to their products like size, color etc. GetShopped makes it quite easy to handle such kind of variations for each product.
GetShopped handles variations in a very practical manner. After you’ve added your variation sets, you can then go to the product and add them. If you have two variation sets, one with 3 options and another one with 2 options, GetShopped will calculate that you have 6 variations of the same product. You can then specify a weight, stock count, price, and SKU for each one.
eShop
eShop calls variations options. By default, each product can have up to three options from the product creation screen. You can also create pre-made "Option Sets" which allows you to add variations to product conveniently. Sets can have up to five variations. Each option has a specific price. Variation management in eShop isn't as flexible as with other shopping cart plugins and the number of allowed variations is actually configurable. Some users have up to 30 variations!
MarketPress
For each product you create with MarketPress, you can specify as many variations as you like. Each variation you specify has its own SKU, price, sale price, and inventory control.
Tribulant Shopping Cart
Tribulant Shopping Cart handles product variations pretty well, but some hardcore merchants may still face some limitations.
Variations are given their own dedicated screen in Tribulant Shopping Cart. On that screen, you add as many variation metrics as you want, i.e. size, weight, color, capacity, what have you. Then you go to another screen that's called "Variation Options" and for each metric you added, you'll now add its options, i.e small, medium, 10lbs, 20lbs, black, white, etc.
While you can specify a price for each variation option, you cannot specify an inventory count.
Screenshot: adding a product variation metric in Tribulant Shopping Cart
Screenshot: adding a product variation option to a metric in Tribulant Shopping Cart
Market Theme
Market Theme support for product variations is not as flexible as it should be. It only support two types of product variations. The default labels for the two types are: size and color. It is possible, however, to change those labels to anything else, like capacity, mega-pixels, whatever.
YAK
The way YAK handles variations is not very scalable. If you have many products, each with a few variations, you may find YAK's handling of variation a little disorganized. It is, however, workable.
For each variation you create, you can specify a quantity, its own price, weight and SKU.
ShopperPress
While ShopperPress is able to handle product variations, the process of adding a lot of variations can be tedious. All variations are added as comma-separated list of items. You can set the price for each variation, but you don't have inventory control over quantity, and you cannot have a specific shipping rate per variation.
DukaPress
Creating product variations in DukaPress is easy. On the "Add Product" screen, you have a widget called "DukaPress Product options". You simply add the variations you want in there. For each variation, you can specify a name and a price only.
wpStoreCart
It is possible to sell product variations with wpStoreCart as you can see in this detailed guide. However, notice that you can only set the price for variations. You cannot set a different shipping or inventory count.
Templatic Ecommerce
While Templatic Ecommerce does allow you to specify product variations, the way it handles them is not as robust as some of the other plugins. The only two types of variations you can create are "size" and "color", and only the price and stock count are adjustable. You cannot set a price and stock count for combinations, like a certain size with a certain color.
Jigoshop
The ability to create variations on products is an essential feature of any good ecommerce shopping cart. Jigoshop allows you to create an unlimited number of options for any product; this is accomplished by using "Attributes" to set a range of options. These are set at a categorization level, allowing you to apply each set of Attributes to as many products as you like.
This one feature is nicely and thoughtfully implemented in Jigoshop, which sets it apart from many other similar shopping cart products. Although the interface looks simple, the product variation feature packs in a lot of punch.
Jigoshop has a nice feature seldom seen in other shopping carts: grouped products. Product groups display several related products on one page. For example, if you are selling laptop accessories for one specific model, you can have a grouped product and sell a case, extra battery, external mouse or keyboard all from the same page.
TheCartPress
The ability to create variations on products is an essential feature of any good ecommerce shopping cart. TheCartPress however sorely lacks the flexibility to add product variations. You can instead create custom fields for the different attributes of the product: color, length, size etc.
WP Online Store
WP Online Store allows you to easily customize the different attributes of your products. If you need to have different sizes, options, colors, and different prices for each option, you have the ability to set this. When you first look at the Products Attributes section, it looks a bit complicated; but once you get a hang of it, it's quite easy. You can also create your own custom attributes if you find that the one you need is not available. You can also add multiple images for each product if required.
