Loaded Commerce Community

I am dealing with fishing lures. There are many with different weight options, head color options and skirt color options.

Currently, I'm using drop-down lists for the attributes (lure weight and head colors), and subproducts for the skirt colors. Some of the products have 70 possible skirt colors so there can be a long list of subproducts.

I have a couple of goals here, to make the product page easier to use for my customer.

Currently, there is a single place to choose the product attributes, and a single 'Add To Wishlish' and 'Add to Cart' button on the page. So the customer has to choose a single weight and head color, then they can choose the appropriate skirt color(s) from the list, populate the number of items they want and scroll all the way to the bottom for the Add To buttons. Naturally, this isn't the best way to do it.

My goals:
Goal #1: I would like to make the product attributes (shown with a drop-down list box) required to be able to add a product to the shopping cart.

Goal #2: I would like to move the attribute choices to each subproduct so that a customer can order different weights for each skirt color they liked and add them to the wishlist or cart all at the same time. This should save the customer considerable 'browsing' time when purchasing products.

Goal #3: If I can't make goal #2 work, then I think that I would like place the Add To Wishlist and Add To Cart button to each subproduct so that the customer doesn't have to scroll to the bottom of the page to add the item to the appropriate choice.

I know that I could create "blank" or "Choose One" product attributes and add them to each of the products as the default choice, but that still wouldn't stop a customer from adding a lure with a certain skirt color but no weight or head color.

We have tried to make the text for "Choose an option" stand out but that hasn't helped much. This creates a lot of work for our order processing people because they have to call the customer a lot of times to verify the weight and head color choices. We need to eliminate this extra work if at all possible.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to make this work?

I discovered how to make the attribute choices display for each of my subproducts, however the admin panel where I set that option said "Select True to repeat display the parent attributes for the sub-product in Single Purchase view." However, the "sub-product purchase presentation" is currently set to Multi.

Visually, it is displaying properly. It's showing the attributes on each subproduct, but the text makes me think that it will only actually work in single purchase mode, and I'm not running that mode.

The wording is a tad confusing, so I'm testing to determine if it will work the way it is right now with adding multiple products to the cart at one time.

If this works, I will only have to get my primary goal of making the product attributes required to add a product to the cart or wishlist.

Single purchase mode presents an 'add to cart' button to the right of each subproduct, hence 'only one' subproduct can be purchased at a time. Multi should work as this can be a quantity input field or just a checkbox (for a 1 unit purchase.)

I think the bigger issue is how you're using navigation (categories, search) because a dropdown attribute selector with 70 colours is pretty extreme for anyone to use (IMO.)

There are also some templates around that have a useful filter system which acts on search results, thereby avoiding huge attributes lists as the customer can narrow down what s/he is after using that instead.

Simon