Can Exp:resso Store sell bundles of products?

Question

I've installed a shop for a client, but told him that we most probably have to switch to cartthrob because of the high requirements the final shop will have. at the moment they are just selling the merchandizing stuff and they really really love the tool! and I love it too! so before switching, I might as well ask you if exp:resso store can handle the final requirements:

it's a record label store:
so products of a typical release can contain:

1. merchandizing stuff like t-shirts (w/ modifyers, colors, sizes), posters, books, dvds etc.
2. the physical product like cd, lp, mp3 stick
3. the virtual product, like mp3’s, wav, aiff files.
4. tickets to shows
5. bundles of 1-5… like, buy an album, get a ticket for free… or any other combination.

so putting this all together will be rather complex I think.

eg: if someone buys the physical LP (yes, vinyl), they should automatically get the download version for free.
you should be able to purchase one digital song or the whole album. but the bundled album price vs. all songs should be a little cheaper.
there should be different prices for mp3’s, aiff, flacs and wavs…

now my question is: has this already been done with store? do you have code samples of a working shop? do you think such a thing is feasable with store?

cheers
stefan

Answer 1

Since products are stored as channel entries, it's really easy to create bundles of product using Playa, or even standard EE relationships.

Remember you can have multiple product channels. For example, with Tracks and Albums, you could create a channel for Tracks (which has a Store product fieldtype associated with it for individual track sales), and another channel for Albums (which also has a product fieldtype, and is related to the individual tracks.

In your case you could also create a product channels for Tickets, Merchandise, and if you want to create some bundles containing everything, one more called Bundles or something similar, which can be related to any other product channel. How you display this on the front end is entirely up to you.

The only downside to this is that it is not possible to keep track of stock levels for bundled products. If you are selling digital products this isn't an issue, and for physical products it really depends on your client's requirements.