Thread: Best way to handle different products

I'm setting up my products and I'm wondering what the best way to handle multiple product variants.

I have two products, one with UPC 04000-1 and 04001-1.

They are identical products ( from a consumer point of view ). Except that one is Double Chocolate and the other is French Vanilla.

I'm assuming they should be set up as one product and then make the flavors variants.

Is this the recommended use of Variants?

I'm assuming in these cases, the Variant name would be the Flavor, correct? It seems to be appended to the Product name in the templates I checked.

In addition, I assume that I leave the "Product" SKU blank in this case.

Also, I noticed that the Variants have descriptions, but I don't see any place this is used in the template. Is there a template that uses the Variant Description as opposed to the product Description? I know I will roll my own XSLT templates, but I wanted to know a good starting point as my XSLT skllz are sub-optimal.

That's pretty much the standard use of variants, yes. Variant descriptions aren't used out of the box in any of the XML packages, that's going to take some custom XML work (though nothing too difficult).

This is probably a dumb question, but how do I get each of my variants to show up in my add to cart drop down box?

You would need to set the Display Format XML Package attribute on that product to an XML package that supports variants (like product.variantsindropdown.xml.config)

Is there a way to make the product.variantsindropdown.xml.config

The default for all products?

Those XML packages are listed in alphabetical order in the Display Format XML Package dropdown. If there's a certain one you want to use for all of your products, just rename it to product.aaaa.xml.config (or something that'll put it at the top of the list) and that'll end up as the default.