Lots of good questions! (Hey, I’m just the IT guy!)
I think we are planning that. (There likely only be {white, black, forest, midnight blue, yellow} colors.)
Does the color and size impact the price?
I don’t think think so.
Will configurable attributes be static or dynamic? You “say” all you need NOW is color and size, but will that ever change or change based on the selected design?
It certainly could change.
This is a start-up business, so supply will meet demand.
You were saying something about gender-type and shirt-style. How do those impact the price of the design? Do they even impact the price of the design or are they more or less classifications by which to group similar designs for display purposes?
Well, I believe we will just start with plain old T-shirts. But if demand grows, we might offer different style shirts (e.g. long-sleeve, crew, sweatshirts, etc.)
The price would surely change between a T-shirt and a Sweatshirt.
Like many real-life situations, we just don’t know what will happen on so many levels, and as the IT-side of this partnership, I’m just trying to build a reasonably well-designed solution. (You don’t need a school bus if you can only get a few passengers.)
Here are my guesses on things…
Color probably won’t affect price unless it is some strange or obscure color.
Size probably has a minimal impact and we could likely just price an average to standardize the price across sizes.
Shirt style will definitely affect price IF we ever offer more than just T-shirts.
I don’t mind building tables that handle every combination of color, size, shirt type, etc HOWEVER, do I need to create a unique SKU for every possible combination?
Do I need…
tshirt_male_blue_xlarge
tshirt_male_red_xlarge
tshirt_female_blue_xlarge
tshirt_female_red_xlarge
I mean I guess concatenating component attributes to create a “master SKU” wouldn’t be that hard, but I just wasn’t sure if that’s the way you want to do things.
Realistically to increase our chances of business survival, I would think that we want to minimize the shirt size and color selection and focus on the silk-screen images.
(You likely spend $30 on a T-shirt because it says “Iowa Little-League State Champions 2010” and not because it is blue?!)
And, therefore, I was leaning towards just making the SKU based on the silk-screen.
Then again, the components of making a finished product could be important enough making a more complex SKU. (Good thing we aren’t building computers!)
Hope that helps answer your questions and to give you a better idea of what we might face.
TomTees