Inventory Builder - Items: Product Grouping

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It's possible to group individual items into one main parent item, essentially creating the ability to offer variations of said parent item in a drop-down menu. Let's assume you are offering a tour of some sort, that has multiple different fixed durations (i.e. 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 take all those separate items and group them together as one. This makes for a much more streamlined booking page with fewer headaches for you and your customers!

 

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First of all, you will need to create the parent item. This is the item that will be displayed 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. In this case, 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 simply copy the item we already have and change the title/SKU to reflect the new timeslot.

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

 

 

A new item will be created with the same pricing and attributes etc. as the original. All you need to do is choose a unique SKU and change the item title. It's best to put the time of the tour in the item title so that customers can quickly see when the tour is.

 

 

After creating the new item, you'll see a confirmation message on the screen. From here, choose the copy option again to create the next time-slot.

 

 

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

 

When finished, you'll 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 it's Packages tab. In the Product Grouping section, turn on the feature by clicking on the slider. Please note, 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, labeled 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 will be shown all available items in your inventory. If you'd like to include your items that are unavailable, click on the slider labeled Show Unavailable Children. Now, once you've saved the item, go back to your booking portal and have a 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 will see a drop-down menu where the customer can select the tour time they want. Brilliant!

 

 

 

 

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Finally, it's possible that not all items in the product group will be priced the same. Maybe the 3 pm tour costs more than the 9 am tour. So, you are able to enter a price in the Product Group Pricing field, after turning on the switch, that will be displayed as From $95, as an example.

 

 

 

 

 

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< Items - Inventory Builder: Packages

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