Variants, Composite Items, and... Configurable Items with Ad Ons?

Variants, Composite Items, and... Configurable Items with Ad Ons?

So I had to review a few of these concepts, and felt like there may need to be some clearer distinction made between the abstractions that we use to create associations between multiple items in inventory - sometimes with selections available to the customer, sometimes bundling multiple items into a single SKU, either because something's been manufactured or discounted at a bundled price, or simply for marketing purposes and how we'd like to group associated items on our product pages..

In this regard, I think there's a lot of room for confusion and that it may be helpful to others if I share my personal understanding of these concepts, and invite others to enhance or correct as necessary.

Hopefully this will help provide a better understanding as to how and when these features can or should be used in order to achieve both better inventory management and product presentation within your store.

As such, the following are how I've come to understand define the following concepts that can easily be confused.  These are - Item Variants, Composite Items, and Configurable Items / Add Ons (the last is not currently a Commerce feature, but one that I would propose should be, and is functionality within several other ecommerce systems.  More on that below...):

Variants
A Variant generally should be in item that comes prepackaged from a supplier, usually with its own dedicated UPC or SKUs. It's a variant because it may be conceptually grouped along-side with other very similar items with variations that pivot on one or more specific attributes. Some of these attributes might be size, color, flavor, etc. Each one of these attributes will multiply the number of SKUs by the number of new options within that attribute. (It's worth mentioning that you don't need to keep all of possible the variants SKUs if, for example, all colors are not being ordered for all sizes of a particular item - in which case the automatically generated SKUs can simply be deleted).

The inventory for any variant is increased when it's received and decreased when it's sold.  

Presentation at the point of sale is such that all variants are presented on a single product page.  Selecting the appropriate attribute options on a product page allows the customer to ultimately arrive at the specific product variant they wish to order.  

It's important to emphasize that selecting a variant on the product page is a "deductive" process during the point of sale, whereby each attribute option that is selected further hones in and reduces the number of remaining variants until the last attribute is selected.  This makes it much easier for your customer to quickly and specifically identify one variant among perhaps hundreds of other similar items without having to wade through pages of items.

Composite Items
A Composite Item is a pre-bundled "composite" of multiple SKUs. (Note the word "PRE-bundled"). This feature is really meant for those who bring in various pieces, parts, and components (which may or may not also be sold individually), but are assembled into AND presented as a single bigger product - hense the name "Composite Item".

As such, from a presentation standpoint, the Composite Item is a single SKU that you sell to your customer.  Behind the scenes, a composite item comprises of the pieces and parts initially received and inventoried as other SKUs.  The magic here is in the bundling.  Once bundled into a composite item, the inventory quantities are automatically reallocated reducing the on-hand counts all of those parts that are used to manufacture the Composite Items.

Composite Items are quite useful to you if you are a manufacturer in order to help you maintain and track your on-hand parts, make adjustments, and see if you're running short on this part or that for one product or another.

Generally, Composite Items are planned for in advance, and are usually bundled, allocated, and typically prepackaged well before the sale.

Composite Items are meant to define in your inventory a finished product from the parts that it's made from. This provides a means for automatic parts allocation for the purpose of assembling components into finished goods with the needed visibility and reporting that you otherwise would have to deal with manually in other painstaking ways (e.g. maintaining multiple inventories, one for manufacturing, and one for sales, etc.).

As such, the Composite Items feature allow manufacturers to have both the parts and the finished products coexist happily in one place and allocate the former into the latter as needed. It's inclusion into Inventory (and now into Commerce) has likely been a big deal for many, and a pretty significant accomplishment on Zoho's part.  Considering that that EDI can also available be integrated with Zoho Inventory, this is a pretty serious level of functionality for manufacturers that would otherwise be difficult to rival at Zoho's price point.
  
Configurable Items / Add Ons
There is however a third concept however, which I believe is very much desired, but is not yet included as part of Commerce, and oddly I think it's the arguably a feature that would probably be fairly east for the Commerce group to implement, being that it shouldn't be contingent on the changes to the Inventory Schema shared by the other Zoho apps.

I also think that it's something that is one of the more desired features, but not identified as such because it gets confused for and/or grouped in with certain other features when it's really quite a separate feature all together, for example... by that I mean that Variants and Composite Items are often being mistaken by users for what should really be considered as an entirely different and separate feature - that being the "Configurable Item with Add Ons".

The feature I'm describing here is used and implemented frequently on websites selling computers.  You sell the "bare-bones" system, which might be the enclosure and the motherboard, then you have a dropdown box to select what CPU, another dropdown box allows you to select the RAM, and another for the power supply.

It's important to understand that this is not a deductive selection (like it is with variants) in that each of the selections under each of these drop-downs is not honing down to a singular SKU.  Nor is it a Composite Item in which a single SKU is the composite of many that were preallocated into a final product.

Rather, this is an additive process at the point of sale, enabling the customer to configure their own system by selecting from multiple SKUs that are simply associated to a base "Configurable Item".  It's a function of presentation, and requires no preallocation of inventory.

It's important to understand that the base Configurable Item can be sold by itself, but is presented with optional "Add Ons".  When Add Ons are selected, pressing the "Add to Cart" button ads the base Configurable Item, along with the SKUs (and relevant Quantities, which should also be optionally presentable) of the other associated "Add On" items.

So in this way, there is never any sort of preallocation required for Add Ons within a Configurable Item.  It's only the relationship between the Configurable Item and its available Add Ons that needs to be established (e.g. perhaps within the Configurable Item's product page editor) that determines that such "Add Ons" be presented within the product page. 

Since this is only a function of presentation, the SKUs for the individual items (the base Configurable Item plus the Add On items) are still maintained within the cart, with no need to package them for the purpose of how they're seen from the perspective of the customer.

One other important distinction in this regard might be with respect to discounting.  Composite Items (not Configurable Items) can also be presented with package discounts.  Applying package discounts to Configurable Items might not be so straight forward if desired.

Anyhow, hopefully this will provide better understanding for those who are trying to strategize how to setup their inventory, and also serve as a proposed implementation that Zoho might consider in order to add in some sort of "Configurable Item / Add Ons" capability within the product page templates and be manageable on the back end via the product page editor.

This can theoretically be accomplished using custom fields and some modification to the Face product template files, but it would be nice if this functionality was part of Commerce itself without needing to hack it in.

Thanks,
Bryan

      Zoho Campaigns Resources


        • Desk Community Learning Series


        • Digest


        • Functions


        • Meetups


        • Kbase


        • Resources


        • Glossary


        • Desk Marketplace


        • MVP Corner


        • Word of the Day


        • Ask the Experts


          Zoho CRM Plus Resources

            Zoho Books Resources


              Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                Zoho Projects Resources


                  Zoho Sprints Resources


                    Zoho Orchestly Resources


                      Zoho Creator Resources


                        Zoho WorkDrive Resources



                          Zoho CRM Resources

                          • CRM Community Learning Series

                            CRM Community Learning Series


                          • Tips

                            Tips

                          • Functions

                            Functions

                          • Meetups

                            Meetups

                          • Kbase

                            Kbase

                          • Resources

                            Resources

                          • Digest

                            Digest

                          • CRM Marketplace

                            CRM Marketplace

                          • MVP Corner

                            MVP Corner




                            Zoho Writer Writer

                            Get Started. Write Away!

                            Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                              Zoho CRM コンテンツ






                                ご検討中の方

                                  • Recent Topics

                                  • Integrate your Outlook/ Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM via Graph API

                                    Hello folks, In addition to the existing IMAP and POP options, you can now integrate your Outlook/Office 365 inbox with Zoho CRM via Graph API. Why did we add this option? Microsoft Graph API offers a single endpoint to access data from across Microsoft’s

                                  • Any way to "Pay with Check" or "Refund with Check" for Credit Notes?

                                    When we have a Bill in Zoho Books, we can select the "Pay with Check" option which then allows us to print/cut the check directly out of Zoho Books. When we created a Credit Note and want to refund the customer, is there any way to Refund with Check,

                                  • CRM Mobile reports

                                    When our engineers finish a job they like to email the customer a job report. This is best done todate as an email template but we can find no way to include an image field from that module. Is there any other options?

                                  • When Zoho Tables Beta will be open to EU data center

                                    Hello all, We in EU are looking at you all using and testing and are getting jealous :) When we will be able to get into the beta also? We don't mind testing and playing with beta software. Thank you!

                                  • Start Form on a different page (i.e., hide form pages)?

                                    I have a Zoho form that uses the `Field Alias - Prefill URL` feature. My goal is to have a pre-filled field that directs the user to a specific starting page in the form. For example: The URL will have a field alias that will auto-populate a field with

                                  • How can we disable "My Requests"?

                                    We are not using this functionality in our system at all and our users get confused.

                                  • PayPal payment received recording problem

                                    Hi, A little while back one of our customers used the PayPal payment option to pay an invoice For some reason though the payment is showing up twice within the Payments section of the invoice! Instead of setting the invoice value to ZERO, it now shows a negative value Anyone else face this problem? I've checked PayPal and there is only 1 payment in reality... A bug? Actonia ps: for anyone from Zoho Customer Service or tech team,  its Invoice 785 in our account

                                  • string(87) "{"code":"INVALID_TOKEN","details":{},"message":"invalid oauth token","status":"error"} " grtting this error

                                    Using access token i am trying to add sales orders through api but it is throwing errors like the above i have mentioned. Please help me for that

                                  • How to mute chat notification sound by default in Zoho SalesIQ?

                                    We’ve recently embedded the Zoho SalesIQ chatbot on our website, and we’ve noticed that notification sounds sometimes play even when the visitor hasn’t interacted with the chat widget yet. We’re trying to understand two things: Why do these sounds occur

                                  • Kanban View for Projects.

                                    At our organization, we describe active projects with various statuses like "In Proofing" or "Printing" or "Mailing". In the Projects view, one can set these project statuses by selecting from the appropriate drop-down. While this works, it's difficult to view and comprehend the progress of all of your projects relative to each other in a table. Creating a Kanban view for projects where I can move them from one status to another allows me to see where each project is in the order of our workflow.

                                  • How to Hide Article Links in SalesIQ Answer Bot Responses

                                    I have published an article in SalesIQ, and the Answer Bot is fetching the data and responding correctly. However, it is also displaying the article link, which I don’t want. How can I remove the link so that only the message is shown?

                                  • Add RECURRING option when adding email to calendar events

                                    When you add an email to a calendar event, there is no option to make that new calendar event into a recurring event.  It is counterproductive to make an event from your email to then have to go to your calendar, find the event, and make it recurring. 

                                  • Using Contains as a filter

                                    We are using Zoho Reports, ServiceDesk Plus analytics. I do not see how to create a report filter using Contains comparison of a string values, is one string contained in another. For example, Task Title contains the word Monitor. Is this possible in Zoho Reports?  This reporting feature is available in SDP reporting. Thanks in advance, Craig Rice

                                  • LINE Auto Message Connect to Zoho

                                    When I integrated LINE into the CRM, I was prompted to disable “Chat,” “Auto Response,” and “Greeting Messages,” and to enable the webhook. However, since I have already set up some auto-reply features in LINE, including Rich Messages and greeting automation,

                                  • Option to block bookings from specific email address or ip adresss in zoho booking

                                    Sometime few of our client keep booking irrelevant booking service just to resolve their queries and they keep booking it again and again whenever they have queries. Currently its disturbing our current communication process and hierarchy which we have

                                  • Threaded conversations for emails sent via automation

                                    Hi Guys, I hope you are doing well. Don't you guys think we should have an option in a workflow to notify users either as a new email or the previous email thread. For example, if you have one deal in the process and there are 10 different stages during

                                  • All new Address Field in Zoho CRM: maintain structured and accurate address inputs

                                    The address field will be available exclusively for IN DC users. We'll keep you updated on the DC-specific rollout soon. It's currently available for all new sign-ups and for existing Zoho CRM orgs which are in the Professional edition. Managing addresses

                                  • Create folder is fetch fails

                                    coming from zapier... zapier has a google drive task that searches for a specific folder in google drive, and if it fails to find the folder it will create a folder based on the search criteria, and contine along the singluar path of the flow. Trying

                                  • Meetups de Usuarios de Zoho - Noviembre 2025

                                    ¡Hola, Comunidad! Durante el mes de noviembre celebraremos los Meetups de usuarios de Zoho, encuentros presenciales pensados para quienes queráis mejorar vuestras estrategias de lead nurturing y aprender a sacar el máximo partido a herramientas como Zoho

                                  • Introducing 7 New Connectors in Zoho DataPrep!

                                    We’ve just made data management even easier - Zoho DataPrep now supports 7 new external connectors to help you build more robust, scalable ETL pipelines. Why it matters: ✅ Broader data access ✅ More automation, less manual work ✅ Smarter pipelines, better

                                  • Sales Order, Invoice and Payment numbers

                                    Hi zoho friends, it is me again, the slow learner. I'm wondering if there is a way to have it so the Sales order, invoice and payment numbers are all the same? It would be easier for me if they were the same number so there is not so many reference numbers

                                  • Missing information data Zoho inventory

                                    there some missing data in Zoho inventory connection. pick list stock counts bin location we have requested it via mail and the support team doesn’t gove feedback. has anyone achieve to get these info or to ask other ya les

                                  • First day of trying FSM in the field.

                                    What we found. 1. with out a network connection we were unable to start a service call? 2. if you go to an appointment and then want to add an asset it does not seem possible. 3. disappointed not to be able to actually take a payment from within the app

                                  • Zoho Desk app update: AI powered features

                                    Hello everyone! We’ve introduced various AI-powered services on the Zoho Desk app. Let's take a look at what's new. Generate Content: Generate Content uses AI to formulate responses based on the your query and provides a ready-to-use reply which can be

                                  • How to Automate Email Sequence

                                    I'm having trouble trying to set up a workflow to automate an email sequence. Once a group of emails in a Task has been tagged by a certain tag, I want an instant email template to be sent. After 7 days with no response, another email template would be

                                  • Turning off the new UI

                                    Tried the new 'enhanced' UI and actively dislike it. Anyone know how to revert back?

                                  • Zoho Sprints Android v2.0.4 app update: Item reminders, archive Epics, Kanban projects, Epic progress

                                    Hello everyone! In the latest version(v2.0.4) of the Zoho Sprints Android app update, we have introduced various new features. Let's take a look at what's new! Item Reminder Stay organized and never miss an important date with the all-new Item Reminder

                                  • Credit Management: #3 Setting Credit Limit for Customers

                                    Think about that one familiar customer of yours who always buys on credit. They usually pay on time, maybe a little late here and there, but not alarming. So, you are fine saying, "Sure, pay later." Then, one day, they place a significantly bigger order

                                  • Canvas View in Zoho Recruit

                                    Is it possible or would it be possible to have the new 'Canvas View' in Zoho Recruit?

                                  • Adding Reports to Portals

                                    Is there a way to add Reports to portals so only the user can see report templates relevant to them?

                                  • Update on the client portal URL for Guest users

                                    We’re updating the way Guest users access their Connect network. As part of this change, all client organization portals used by Guest users will now be accessible through a dedicated domain specific to each data center. The access URLs mentioned here

                                  • Preserve Ticket Issue Mapping When Migrating from Jira to Zoho Projects

                                    Hello Zoho Projects Team, We hope you are doing well. We are currently exploring a full migration from Jira to Zoho Projects, and we identified a critical limitation during the migration process involving Zoho Desk integration. Current Situation: We use

                                  • Enhancements to Zoho Maps integration tasks

                                    Hello everyone, We're excited to announce enhancements to the Zoho Maps integration tasks in Deluge, which will boost its performance. This post will walk you through the upcoming changes, explain why we're making them, and detail the steps you need to

                                  • Unable to see Zoho contacts in Zoho app on ios

                                    Hi Support Team, I am a new user, I have created my account and installed zohomail app on iOS 16 which works. I was also able to import my Gmail contacts into Zoho Contacts, which I can see. The problem is that I can’t see these imported cobalts in Zohomail

                                  • Task Due Date greater than 10 years.

                                    We use recurring tasks in Projects where every week, month, year etc Some of our projects are greater than 10 years and we are unable to set a new due date because the difference between start date and due date is greater than 10 years. As an example

                                  • External User onboarding for zoho connect is not really intuitive.

                                    So the external user is sent an invite, which has a button that directs them to login to zoho to view the invite, but if they don't have a zoho account, they cannot access that invite, which seems kinda silly, as there is not real way on for them to create

                                  • Enhance Sign CRM integration

                                    Hello all, I'm working on a custom Deluge script to enhance the integration between Zoho CRM and Sign by using a writer merge template for additional flexibility. I want to replicate the post-sign document integration that exists between CRM and Sign

                                  • Hosting external websites on Zoho?

                                    How can I host my external website on zoho? Do we have that option? I am currently with hostinger and am looking to switch to zoho. Kindly help. Thanks.

                                  • How to Add Time Formula Duration (hh:mm)

                                    Hi everyone — I’m trying to create a formula field in Zoho CRM that calculates the difference between a “Call Start Time” and “Call End Time” and displays the duration in HH:MM format (for example: 1:04 for one hour and four minutes). My current setup

                                  • How can I calculate the physical stock available for sale?

                                    Hey Zoho Team,  I've tried to calculate the physical stock on hand in various ways - but always receive a mismatch between what's displayed in Zoho Inventory & analytics.  Can you please let me know how the physical stock available for sale is calculated?

                                  • Next Page