Product variations

Product variations are used to distinguish differences in your products. They can be used to represent different colours of t-shirt, sizes of furniture, etc.

Depending on the configuration of your product types, you may be able to add a number of variations to your products. Every variation can modify the price of your item and a number of other attributes, but they all share the same product page, which allows your customers to select the exact item they would like to purchase.

You can choose to create an entirely new product for each seperate variation, but when the differences are only small, this can lead to a lot of extra management on your part, and a lot of extra searching for your users.

Variation pricing models

When adding a variation, you can choose one of four pricing models. The options are:

• Same as base price
• A different, fixed price
• A percentage difference
• A fixed difference

If you choose any option but the first, you will need to then enter a value into the extra box. This value can be a positive or negative number, and based on the model, will translate into a difference in price if a customer purchases your product and selects this variation to buy.

The final value specific to variations is called stock deduction value. This field is optional, and will default to a value of 1, but if set, this is the number that will be deducted from the product's stock if a customer purchases your item and chooses this variation.
An example of the usage of this option may be if you're selling a ticket to an event, which usually covers one seat. But if one of your variations was a family ticket, you may choose to have the purchase of the family ticket deduct 4 from your stock - one for each seat covered by the family ticket type.

Combinations

Combinations are automatically calculated from your product variations.

For example, if your product is a t-shirt, you may have 2 variation types - colours and sizes.
If you add red, green, black and white as colour options, and small, medium, large and extra large as sizes, your combinations would be calculated as:

• Red, Small
• Green, Small
• Black, Small
• White, Small
• Red, Medium
• Green, Medium
• Etc, for every complete combination of variations.

You can see an example of a complete set of combinations for a product with 2 variation types in the image to the right.

For each of these automatic combinations, you can choose to set stock levels, SKU information and even disable particular combinations from being available for sale.

When a customer chooses to purchase a medium black t-shirt, LabelEd will calculate the resulting price of the product and detect stock and availability based on the options you have set.

In the case of a combination being made out of more than one variation, LabelEd will combine your pricing model differences and calculate the overall price using the following order precedence:

• Fixed price
• Percentage differences
• Fixed differences

The combinations interface in your administration area will display the prices calculated for each combination so that you can confirm that the resulting prices are as you intend.