Configuring product grouping with items using the Item Builder (Classic Items)

Learn how to set up product grouping for items, including pricing.

New to the Item Builder? You can read the first article in this series for an introduction to the Item Builder.

Accessing the features mentioned in this article

Where can I find this feature using the top menu?

Inventory > Items > Add New/Edit Item > Packages > Product Grouping

What more do I need to use this feature?

Admin or restricted permissions to View items, products, and assets and Manage items, products, and assets.

Which Checkfront version supports this feature - Classic Items, Classic Products, or both?

Your account must have access to classic items (Inventory > Items), a key feature of our Classic Items version of Checkfront.

Product grouping overview (with video)

It's possible to group individual items into one main parent item, creating the ability to offer variations of said item in a drop-down menu.

Let's assume you offer a tour with multiple fixed durations (e.g. 2 hours, 4 hours, and 6 hours). In the past, these would have been created as separate items and displayed to the customer one after another in the main booking portal. With Product Grouping, however, you can now group all those separate items as one.

This makes for a much more streamlined booking page with fewer headaches for you and your customers!

Configuring Product Groupings

First of all, you need to create the parent item. This item displays to the customer in the booking portal. In this example, we’ll use our 2 Hour Boat Tour.

Additional items should now be created for each of the available timeslots. Let's say there is a tour at 9 am, 11 am, 1 pm and 3 pm. So, that's 4 additional items on top of the parent. The quickest way to create these items is to copy the item we already have and change the title/SKU to reflect the new timeslot.

A link labelled More is in the bottom right corner of the item edit screen. Click on this to reveal a menu. From here, choose Copy

A new item is created with the same pricing and attributes as the original. You only need to choose a unique SKU and change the item title. It's best to put the tour time in the item title so Customers can quickly see when the tour is.

After creating the new item, you see a confirmation message on the screen. Choose the copy option again to create the next time slot from here.

Copying an item is a great time-saver anytime you have similar items to create. Copy, then edit the item to make necessary changes rather than creating a new item every time!

When finished, you have an inventory of items that looks something like this:

Looking at the booking portal now, you will see this:

This is okay, but there's a better way to do it!

Go back to the parent item and click on its Packages tab. In the Product Grouping section, turn on the feature by clicking the slider.

Product grouping is disabled if the item already has a package add-on attached.

A new Group Type field will appear. From the drop-down menu, select Parent.

Another new field will now appear, labelled Child Items.

Click on this and then put a checkmark next to each item you wish to include in the product grouping. In our case, it's the 4 boat tour items we just created.

By default, you are shown all available items in your inventory. If you want to include your unavailable items, click the Show Unavailable Children slider.

Once you save the item, return to your booking portal and look at the difference. As you can see in the screenshot below, there is now only 1 item listed for the 2-Hour Boat Tour.

If this is selected, you see a dropdown menu where customers can select the tour time they want. Brilliant!