Feedback about my product options customization feature

I am a developer of a growing ecommerce system and thought I would describe a new product option customization feature I recently added to get some feedback on it. I wrote another thread about my shipping box routine and thought I'd write one for this too. Basically, I'd like some peer review of some of these new features to see what others in the biz have to say about it.

Any product in my system can have a "product options customization form". The product has its own article for describing the product, but it can have an article for choosing customization options too. The product uses the latest version of CKEditor so it is a WYSIWYG type editor that has custom plugins to help build up the options. The best way to describe the way it works is to go over the 3 examples I used to build the design and code it.

Example 1: Simple form data to go along with the product. You buy a birthday cake product and want to specify the text that they should put on the cake like "happy birthday John". The cake's price is not impacted by the option. When the person goes to fulfill the order (make the cake), they can see the option and do it right. In this case, they can write the proper text on the cake. You would put a text field in the options form with validation for length and wrap it in text about what they should do in that text field

Example 2: Options for the product come from products in the product catalog and do impact the products price and customization is optional. You buy a pizza and want to add extra toppings. The form has a set of checkboxes that are generated from the "pizza toppings product category items". The pricing for the toppings adds to the price of the base product. Again, when the store goes to fulfill the order (make the pizza) they can see the options chosen and do it right. You would click the product list toolbar button for the editor (a custom editor plugin), which would let you pick the base product, like pizza toppings, and if it was required that they configure it. The list of pizza toppings shown is based on what is in the catalog at the moment the user puts the pizza product in their shopping cart. If you add or remove toppings from the catalog, the list would change for future pizza purchases.

Example 3: Options for the product come from products in the catalog, impact the product price and are not option. You must configure the product to check out properly. You buy a computer, but must pick which hard drive, monitor, memory and other options you want. Each option for the computer impacts the price of the overall product and until you complete the configuration you cannot check out (unless you remove the pc from the cart). This is similar to how dell.com does it.

The options form can be divided up into "wizard steps" in the editor. There is a toolbar that creates a special div for the options to go into, and will add jquery javascript to let you move next/previous through the wizard steps. This only maters for complex option forms, like configuring a custom PC or a wedding package. For each PC customization you would use the product list toolbar button, which has an option for drop down, radio or checkbox list. As with the pizza example, if you added a new hard drive or memory item to the product catalog, it would show up in these lists when the user purchases the base pc.

I wrote the system so that if you have a pricing model that has different prices for products when the user is logged into a certain user group (like "gold members" for example), the option prices would reflect that too. Also, if you apply a discount to products for a week, the discount would apply into the product options as well. That way if you have 10 pizzas that can have custom toppings on them, you can apply the discount pricing to apply for pizza toppings starting next week and it would kick in on all pizzas without having to edit the options form again.

The pricing model of this system allows you to have effective dates for a product, so if you know your pricing will go up by 10% or some specific amount starting Jan 1, 2010, you can start setting the prices now and set the effective date for Jan 1. That way orders today use today's prices and when Jan 1 comes around, the new prices would kick in automatically. Sale prices work that way too. You can apply a start and end date for a price for a product or group of products so that the sale price goes on and off during that time period. Finally, you can specify prices per user group (or pricing discounts/mark ups). So a product could be $10 for general users, but $8 for one type of user and $6 for others. You could configure the store to not show prices on products until the user logs in too.

How does this compare with other ecommerce systems? As I said in my other thread about my boxing routine, I am not deeply familiar with what all the other systems are capable of doing. I have only rolled this out for one customer so far, and thus dont have much feedback on how it really does for a real day to day site that actually sells products all the time.

 

Looks like you have built some decent features. I have seen good capabilities on options and customizations in larger eCommerce platforms but most basic platforms lack these capabilities.

 

This can be very useful. How customizable is the option form itself in terms of colors/shapes/etc? Do you require your customers to dig into css to do the customizations?