Best method for custom product type?

Hi all
I am toying with the idea of trying to sell event tickets using HikaShop. This is for a business that does daily sailing tours on a "Tall Ship" that would like to sell tickets online. There are a total of six different tour types, all with different pricing structures for adult, child and infant passengers and each with a different number of tickets available per tour. The company offers up to three tours per day with different tour types being offered on different days. I am guessing that I can use Categories to differentiate between each tour type - A parent category of "Sailing Tours" with child categories for "Noon Sail", "Afternoon Sail" etc. I also assume that I can use Custom Fields (I have Business Edition) to set pricing for each ticket type and to allow the customer to specify how many of each ticket type they would like to purchase. Pricing could be set using the product table custom field, and ticket quantities could be collected via the Item table. With that structure, each individual tour (for example, the Noon Sail happening on June 1, 2012) would be a Product with a Quantity that matched the number of tickets available for the tour. Customers would specify the desired number of each type of ticket and would receive a total price upon adding the items to their cart.

I am fairly certain I know the answer to this already, but is it possible to create such a configuration without having to write custom code? My PHP skills are fair to average, but I am new to Joomla and have just the vaguest concept of the whole application framework structure...

Thanks
Matt

Nicolas,
Thank you for the reply. I though of that, but haven't been able to figure out quite how to handle the quantity side of things. I thought about making a Characteristic for each ticket type with entry for "1 Adult", "2 Adult", "3 Adult" etc, then handle the pricing with the Variants. In this way, I figured I could handle pricing, but I'm not sure how to tie this into the quantity. Again, there are a fixed number of tickets available for each tour, so how can I deduct the number of tickets chosen via the Variant from the total quantity available for each tour?

Thank You
Matt

This is where the problem is. There are 59 tickets available for each tour. There are three different ticket types (Adult, Child, Infant) for each tour, all with different prices. The tour can be made up of any combination of those three types for a total of 59 tickets, so it is not possible to set a quantity for each ticket type (variant), only a total quantity for the tour (product). I suppose a similar and maybe easier to envision situation would be if your were a florist selling bouquets of 12 flowers. There are three different flowers to choose from with three different prices. The customer is free to choose any combination of one, two or three of those flowers (he may decide to get 12 of one kind!), but the total number can not exceed 12. How would one track both prices and quantities in such a situation?

Thank You
Matt

Nicolas
I am not sure how I can use options to do what I want, either. I still have the problem of tracking how many tickets have been sold, since the selection of options does not seem to be able to update the total quantity for the product. Another example - Imagine you want to sell tickets to a movie theater. There are 59 seats in the theater, so you can sell a total of 59 tickets for each movie. Adult tickets are $10, children's tickets are $5, and people over the age of 65 get in free. How to offer all those options, in any combination, yet limit the number of tickets sold for any one movie to a total of 59?

Thanks
Matt

Nicolas
Thank you for the reply. Unfortunately, this would not allow the user to purchase multiple tickets in one step. Most of the customers are families, so the majority of purchases are for two or more tickets. I think someone buying only two tickets would not mind having to perform two steps to get their tickets, but a family of six might be a different story. Ideally I would like to be able to allow the customer to buy any combination of tickets in one step.

Matt

Hello

I have same kind of question. My client is a small theater group and they want a simple booking system. I bought HikaShop Essential to make the job done.
Seat rows are divided in to three categories: 1-3, 4-6, and 7-8. I thought they had only one price for everyone but now they told me that there are three different price categories; adults, students and children.

Now I am totally confused. Customers should be able to choose seat row and possibly multiple price categories at the same time and the quantities should naturally respond to those choises. Is it even possible?

Unfortunately I am more of a graphic designer and not a coder :/

Hi there,

I'm not sure I totally get what you need but I think it's quite simple.
If you have like 3 products in 3 different categories, the best way is to create a characteristics for the type of seats (adult, student, child).
Then you'll be able to generate variants for each product and give them a different price.
So people will firstly choose their seat, and when they are in the product page, they will be able to select the type.

I hope this will help you, do not hesitate to ask if you have any question

Thank you for your reply. I figured out the thing with money but I still don't know how to approach the quantity problem. Let's say I choose one adult from one dropdown menu and two children from another dropdown. So that should remove three "items" from the quantity. But I don't know how to achieve that.

Hi there,

Acutally if you have defined a quantity for your different products (1-3,4-6,7- then each variant bought (student,...) will decrease the quantity of the main product.
You can test it, it should work

Thanks again.
I see. But is it possible to buy multiple tickets from different categories (adult, child..) at the same time?