I've wanted to ask this question since the early days of CS2000. When
designing the most "efficient" (in terms of displaying on the site and
scalability) catalogs it is better to create individual products or to use
product families with variants?

Example:

I sell a line of widgets with properties of "widget type", "manufacturer",
"size" and "material". I have several different widget types from several
manufacturers. Each widget comes in several different sizes (say 1", 2", 3",
4", etc.) and each size widget is available in serveral different materials
(say "stainless steel", "copper" and "nickle"). Each widget also has it's
own unique "SKU".

Should each widget be a fully described, stand-alone product (perhaps
located under a "widget type" or "manufacturer" category) or should the
"Product Family" be described by "widget type" and "manufacturer" and the
"Product Variants" be described by "size", "material" and "sku"? Or is this
really just a matter of a developer's personal choice rather than a best
practice?

--
Jeff Lynch

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]

Product Families and Variants are in effect regular products. The only
difference is that when you consider a set of variants under a Product
family all the variants are regular products with a common set of property
values which are assigned to the product family. One advamtage of using
product family and variants is that if the values of the common properties
shared by the variants change then you nned to make the change in one place
only. For eg if there are 10 variants under a product family which share a
manufacturer and if the manufacturer changes then you just need to cahnge
the manufacturer of the product family as opposed to changing the
manufacturer of the each regular product (assuming they were stored as
variants). Other than this anything that can be modelled as a product
family can also be modelled as a variant.

See this link
http://blogs.msdn.com/vinayakt/arch.../14/182783.aspx


Thanks
Vinayak Tadas
Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/vinayakt

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--------------------
From: "Jeff Lynch" <jeff.lynch@newsgroup.nospam>
Subject: Best Practices - Products vs. Product Families
Date: Sun, 7 Aug 2005 09:01:31 -0500
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I've wanted to ask this question since the early days of CS2000. When
designing the most "efficient" (in terms of displaying on the site and
scalability) catalogs it is better to create individual products or to use
product families with variants?

Example:

I sell a line of widgets with properties of "widget type", "manufacturer",
"size" and "material". I have several different widget types from several
manufacturers. Each widget comes in several different sizes (say 1", 2", 3",
4", etc.) and each size widget is available in serveral different materials
(say "stainless steel", "copper" and "nickle"). Each widget also has it's
own unique "SKU".

Should each widget be a fully described, stand-alone product (perhaps
located under a "widget type" or "manufacturer" category) or should the
"Product Family" be described by "widget type" and "manufacturer" and the
"Product Variants" be described by "size", "material" and "sku"? Or is this
really just a matter of a developer's personal choice rather than a best
practice?

--
Jeff Lynch

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]