Screen: ShopSite > Products > Edit Product Info
Advanced Ordering Options provide additional fields for up to four product options, such as inventory management for individual product options. More than four options requires using the standard ordering options method. Advanced Ordering Options also provides an extra layer of control over what product options are available. When dealing with two or more ordering options, there might be certain combinations that the merchant either can't support or doesn't want to support. For example, let's say there is a product that has a color option (red, blue, yellow), a graphic print option (bird, star, flower), and a size option (small, medium, large). If the star graphic print option is only available on the small red shirts, the medium blue shirts, and the yellow shirts only come in large, such a setup would be impossible to do using the standard Ordering Options. Advanced Ordering Options can achieve this by simply unselecting the ordering options that don't exist.
In addition to simplifying the above scenario, advanced options also allow merchants to further customize ordering options.
The use of Cascading Menus means that only the first option is available for selection at the start. The customer will select an option from the first drop-down menu, and when that option is selected, the next drop-down menu becomes available to select the next option, etc.
As the order options may be variants on a central product, selecting this check box will append the SKU of the ordering option SKU field to the SKU of the product. For example, if the product SKU is 10324, the ordering option SKU is 004, and this check box is selected, the SKU that appears in the shopping cart would be 10324004. If this check box is not selected, the SKU that would appear in the shopping cart would be 004 (effectively replacing the original product SKU).
This field works in conjunction with the Pull-down Menu names. For example, if there are menus for "Size" and "Color", and this field is set to "Choose", the drop-down menu displayed to customers will have "Choose Size" and "Choose Color".
Like with the Basic Options Pull-down Menus, the Advanced Options Pull-down Menus can be used to modify which ordering options are visible to customers and allows for greater customization of each individual ordering option.
When additional options are needed, instead of clearing out all of the fields for existing options, as when returning to Basic Options, Add Rows can be used. Clicking the Add Rows button prompts the merchant to supply the number of additional rows to create. These new rows, in addition to the usual Advanced Options fields, can also be given a unique option name. This allows merchants to create, not only variations of the previously defined options (for example, adding a Green option to the previously defined Yellow and Blue Color options), but also entirely new options.
The video below provides an example of how to configure Advanced Ordring Options for ShopSite.