My first ever experience with CRE Loaded...

www.rkstores.com/shop

Frankly, CRELoaded is terrible for apparel/fashion. I'm hoping you other apparel/fashion retail webmasters might see this and recommend some good mods/hacks to help improve the functionality of CRELoaded for our industry.

I'm open to all questions/comments/criticisms/suggestions.

Cheers,
Ted

Hello, I have checked your website. It seems nice. The icons are nice.

I have a couple of questions regading your products. Do you know how to add a product in such a way that in the front-end, the user can see what are the available sizes and colors for that apparel? For example, Polo Shirt. I would like the user to be able to click on the Polo Shirt and see the available SIZES and respective COLORS.

I am using CREStandard and I don't see how to to such thing. I noticed that on your products you were able to add the quantity.

Regards,
Peter

Hey Peter,

Well, in B2B (and Pro, I believe) you are able to add sub-products to each product. And, you CAN enter an inventory amount for each sub-product, however the way it handles it is less than ideal.

For example...

You have a Polo Shirt.
It comes in Black or White.
It comes in Small, Medium, or Large.

You would have to create a sub-product for each variation, thus giving you:
Black Small
Black Medium
Black Large
White Small
White Medium
White Large

I would then end up with 6 choices (input boxes to enter quantity) on that product page. If you had more colors, the number of choices would increase exponentially. You could potentially end up with a page with dozens of input boxes to enter quantities.

Our solution to this problem was to enter each color variation as a separate product. This is not exactly ideal... but I guess on the plus side, it looks like we have more products.

I know this doesn't quite answer your question, but I believe if you are looking to enter color and size variations, you need to get the B2B or Pro version.

Regards,
Ted

Ted,

I already tested the PRO version in the getcre.com site, the DEMO version. Have you tried that? Apparently, there is no other way besides what you mentioned. In any case, I am looking for some other module/component (free/paid) but I havent had any luck. This is not very exciting as a software, don't you think? I am looking for other softwares or applications. If I come up across others, I will let you know.

I absolutely agree. And I would very much appreciate any recommendations for apparel/fashion ecommerce carts. Thank you.

PRO VERSION does the item/size/color. Try the demo version and check the SUBCATEGORY product. It will do the things I was looking for. Give it a try. Regards.

I know. But try and keep an inventory count for each variation...

rkTed, what if a certain sweater only comes in one size, say medium? Is it possible to simply grey out or eliminate the other size options? Or at least instead of saying "out of stock" can you customize the message and put "not available" for the other sizes?

Also, is there a way of instead of a customer entering a quantity, to just put a radio button for each size option? (and then just let the customer adjust the quantity in the shopping cart)

By the way peter_ting, if the inventory control is not important to you, you can basically do what you did even in the free Standard version - you can create a sub-category for a certain model, and then create different products for different colors inside that sub-category (this you can do with the free Standard version). So if you have color and size options and you do it this way, you only need to add one option for the products - the "Size" option (since the different colors are already represented as different products). However, with the free Standard version you do not have inventory control so the customer will not receive a message "out of stock". But you can still work with it - if you run out of an item, you could simply email your customer and tell them it's on back-order or will take longer to ship to them (some people wouldn't even go this far & just let the customer wait).

In my case, certain colors only come in a certain size. So that's why I'd have to grey out or eliminate the other size options or put "not available" for the other size options.