Characteristics and organization

I know that this could be considered a feature request, but hear me out, it is becoming such a problem, that we consider it a bug. We offer kits and plans for boats. Because of that there are a lot of options and a good deal of information about the products. We can't use the automatic category generation as it is far too limited.
This isn't a problem because we made menu items for each product and used Joomla to make our own navigation to get around the products. It is all working out great

Except........
Because you have no way of categorizing what you call characteristics, we now have a list of over 70 and growing and it is becoming very unwieldy. We will likely have about 200 before it is done and it is getting out of control fast.

Also, because we are creating menu items for each product page so that bread crumbs will work right, your only option for choosing which product to link to the menu item is a drop down. We are about half way through the shop and the drop down list is huge. This is partially because of the way you use a product to create an option in another product.

I am begging you to help here. Please, please please, give a better navigation in choosing products for menu items allowing us to drill down into categories.

AND, come up with a way to categorize the characteristics so that every time we go looking for one we don't have to either know the exact name or scroll and read.

If you want to see the shop, it is at www.intheboatshed.com/sandypointboatworks If you take a look at the boat kits pages, you can imagine what we have to do to make it work. There are a few of us here working on this migration and frankly it is making our head hurt.

Our product line will almost double in the next couple of years and there is no way we can keep going without having a better way to organize the shop.

Please help.

Thanks, jackbat

I wish you had taken a couple of more seconds to look at the rest of the page. You would have seen that in fact the entire bottom half was options which indeed did have multiple choices. So your suggestion may help the problem, but it sure will not solve it.

I tried what you said and set up two product custom fields on the back end. One a special text field and one a drop down. to see how they would work. They both show up on the backend, but neither shows up on the front end.

I did this using the same page you referenced below so that you could see. I have also attached page grabs of one of the custom fields as well as the product page from the back end so that you could see what is going on.

What do you need to do to actually make them show up?