Does the basics well, but doesn’t allow adding optional products

Hi Hans,

Thanks for your great review! Now that we are able to know the weaknesses of our plugin and we will try to fix it, start by adding features “allow adding optional products”.

If have any problem when using our plugin, feel free to contact us via this page.

Regards,

My pleasure. If it’s feedback that you like, I have some more for you. I’m a slow decider and all of the premium plugins are in my opinion not perfect (like most plugins are an imperfect compromise, helas). So I’ve compared some further and noticed a view more things you can attend to. I really wanted to choose your plugin, since it does most things more right by default imo than others.

The price-bug however is a biggy, that can’t happen when you are in the business of shoveling money, so that needs to be fixed pronto and needs to be part of normal testing.

A few more points then:

1. In my theme the table has no right margin, so the content on the right is stuck to the content-area, rather and that seems particularly crowded when I don’t show prices but show descriptions. I could fix that however with some css, so no biggy.

2. When showing descriptions I have no control on the description that is shown, neither the content nor the length and it doesn’t show a description f.i. for the generated ticket-products by The Events Calendar. I understand that is because the ticket product is not meant to be seen and has no description in it, but making a custom description possible as part of the bundle product would allow me to solve that.

I probably want smaller and other descriptions in that bundle product anyway, than in the original product that I made part of the bundle. f.i. Yith just offers a text area for each description and fills it with what is extracted from the product, but allows editing that text.

3. It would be nice to be able to have the ability to set an amount of product as part of the bundle, but allow visitors to up that number if so desired. So then the product chosen could be set either to be optional (like I spoke of earlier) or fixed (amount) or have a minimum fixed amount with the option to upgrade for more up and until perhaps a maximum amount.

F.i if I offer an overnight activity with a fixed content, but want to offer the possibility to stay longer for the same price per night, I would be able to do that, next to offer extra activities the customer can choose for too. So a customer might want to add 2 extra nights and might want some wellness activity with it, or transportation option, or something like extra sheets. The sky is the limit when something like that is enabled.

4. Having the ability of diverting from the settings for a specific product might be nice too, making the settings to a default and having them overridden (show thumbnails, descriptions, prices) for specific products.

5. I’ve thought some more about the prices and how they can be made more clear. Perhaps a solution may be that below the current table a new line / row is added stating something like “What you should have payed:” followed by the total of the shown prices.

You could even make the complete calculation visible… what you normally should pay… bundle discount… bundle price… I thing that might be a nice presentation that also keeps the strength of your current presentation. It is more clear too, since people tend to read from the top down and it is easier when like an invoice the total is below the price-table. and it should be easy enough to add such extra rows, given what you have already build. Don’t make them think. Of course I could add that by hand since you’ve been so nice to already give the option of adding text before and after the table.

6. personally I would not center the price and thumbnail vertically, but I can use custom css to correct that myself of course. When showing more than one line, its always a question how to keep the presentation nice, so no problem, but I think it would perhaps keep it more together visually, making the thumb to something of a bullet-point-like experience when showing descriptions.

7. For all plugins I’ve tested, It’s been a terrible experience to clean the cart after the plugin is deactivated. Caching may be involved too, but I found that products either where still in the cart, but weren’t shown until the plugin was reactivated, but the total amount was adding the invisible products in the cart still and other plugins (I think yours, perhaps) remove the bundle, but keep the underlying products in the cart, which I found resulted in me having to remove them several times before they were actually removed from the cart. No fun and if possible could the plugin make sure that it is removed automatically? I shows me the hazards of changing or removing this sort of plugins, while there are still products using them.

7. I like that I can choose not to show the underlying products in the (mini-)cart. One of the plugins I tried didn’t have that option, but having all products in the cart makes for a very confusing experience in the cart and checkout, because up to the total under the list it seems than that you not only have to pay the bundle price but also the individual products. On a big screen the indent might be clear enough, but when looking a the collapsed version on a mobile phone that is absolutely too confusing and might make customers hesitate to go through with it. I have found several times that customers get easily confused by even the smallest deviation from what they might expect. So I don;t know if there is a way of making sure when the sub-products are shown in the cart the customer doesn’t get confused by the default presentation. I would probably then rather show only the product items as a priced cart-item, so the reader can add up the items and follow the addition.

Well, this is what comes up at the moment. Hope some of it resonates and finds it’s way in the plugin. I still like it very much for what it does so well, especially the presentation on the front-end, and it’s a bit of a downer not yet being able to choose it. I might convince myself yet, but it must be today.

Thanks,
Hans

The cart-thing may not be that easy. What I want is a clear and easy experience for customers and an invoice that exactly specifies what they have bought. If a bundle has a fixed content that is easy enough. You can just show the bundle name and price and be done.

When the possibility is offered to add some extra options, that is no longer enough. Than the customer doesn’t get any confirmation of the extra’s he/she has bought together with the basic bundle.

What I can imagine to be possible, would be to separate the fixed content of the bundle from the options and have the ability to show the bundle-name together with chosen extra’s/options on the cart and invoices.

This separation would be more easy to follow when the bundle is just considered to be the fixed part of the bundle and the options would be reported in the product as separate options/products that can be added to that fixed basis. Than the same could be done in the product and in the cart/checkout and would automatically result in corresponding invoices when using a popular plugin like “WooCommerce PDF Invoices & Packing Slips”.

So if there are optional products than that could be one option for the customer to add to the bundle, but if the bundle also contains products that have a fixed minimum amount with the option to buy more that too. And the base bundle and the options could be separated in one transaction for the base bundle and separate transactions for the options. One as part of the bundle (the fixed minimum) and the others as options are chosen next to the bundle.

Perhaps not do-able, but it could make for a very explicit and clear experience for the customers… you buy this bundle for this bundle price… and what options would you like to buy extra with it?

It could be a solution to not have to mess up the current presentation and just add to it to offer the options in a separate presentation. Bringing that together in the interface of a single bundle product instead of making it a cross-sell might invite a customer more successful to add the options.

Have you considered offering to use the long description for a more expanded layout (perhaps offering a shortcode or such), so the short description doesn’t have to be so complete? Then component prices and descriptions of products might be part of the long description and the short description can be used to only show the product-item names.

I imagine WooCommerce will make some solutions more easy than others, but from a customer/user perspective, I think this may be a good way to implement flexibility. Indenting product-items just doesn’t work on mobile presentation of the cart, even if the payable total shows the correct amount.

Just some thoughts, for what it’s worth.
Hans