Non weighted products.

I understand why a product weight is important to have, it helps with the shipping  cost calculations etc. But there are numerous of instances where ‘weight’ is a non ecommerce factor.

Imagine building a jewelry ecommerce store, this would either require weighing all the products or making the client go through the nuisance of having to say 0 lbs/kg/gr for every product that’s being added.

Furthermore, having a ‘weight’ as a primary product attribute kinda suggest we’re only thinking about physical products. What about downloadable products? Assembled products? Service subscriptions? These are all product types where weight is a non factor….

Hi Jochem,

you are absolutely correct. The e-commerce preview that you have seen on the webinar has been done quite a long time ago.  In the final release you will be able to create dynamic product types. The weight is not an attribute of a general product anymore.

Therefore, you will be able to have non-physical goods, so to say.

Hi Ivan,

Thanks for adressing that... If you have a more recent build somewhere (official internal or non official) I'd be more than happy to take that for a testdrive. Any further bug hunting on this version seems obsolete...

Jochem.

I see that weight is still a default attribute on a producttype. I don't want to completely delete the field, but I want to make it not required. Can't do this? Also, setting a default value of zero, as a workaround, is not working.

Regards,
Daniel

Hey Daniel,

Telerik kinda divided products into 2 distinct categories ones that are 'shippable' and ones that aren't, basically telling you if a product type has weight or not.

By default the 'general product' is a 'shippable' product, so you have to make a new product type. As an example they already created a MP3 and a book. In the product overview page on the BE, click on the right side of the screen on 'Manage product types'. 

Now on the product type overview, either click on 'Actions' on the General product, select Edit properties and there you can uncheck the 'This type contains shippable products'. But this will mean that all products of that type will no longer have weight.

If you have mixed weighted and non weighted products, just add another 'general product' under a different name but make it non-shippable....

I have products that are non-weighted, but shippable...

That would be an awesome way to cheat postal services :)

But in 'shippable' product type, the 'general product' edit the product-type properties, scroll down to default fields, double click on weight and just type in 0 as the predefined value.

If you want optional weight field in 'non-shippable' products (no idea how that'll work in the checkout process) set the same predefined value. And on the 'appearance' tab in the pop-up, set it to not hidden.


Since it's a numeric field, there's always a check to see if its a valid number and apparently Sitefinity doesn't accept nothing in a non-required field as a valid number.

But in 'shippable' product type, the 'general product' edit the product-type properties, scroll down to default fields, double click on weight and just type in 0 as the predefined value.

This is what I tried, of course, but it has no effect in my application? 
Or am I the only one?

Nah I'm being a blond... that is how it should work, but it doesn't.

Time to file a bug I guess.

Hello Jochem,

Indeed there were some problems with setting predefined values to weight field. I logged PITS issue in our issue tracking system.The issue ID is 7587. 

All the best,