Add To Cart Methods - Auto-generated Products. Pre-generated Variants. Hybrid-generated price variants

Shopify has a limitation on the number of variants per product. To bypass this limitation, and allow you to create an infinite number of variants, our app has 3 methods.

There are 3 ways our plugin can add custom products to the cart:

• Auto-generate products on add to cart  - Each time a custom product is added to the cart, a new product with the "cpb_ordered" product type will be created in the store. This is useful for showing a custom product image in the checkout without Shopify Plus and offers support for complex products with lots of possible variants to be added to the cart as well as products with dimensions, wholesale orders, and unlimited variants.
• Pre-generate variants - This method calculates an approximate number of possible final price variants. These calculations are not ideal and may not take into account some conditional logic rules, you may have in your product. These variants, after they are generated, will be added to the cart. The limitation on the number of variants is 5000. Newly generated products will have  "cpb_variants" product type, and they will have the title 'Custom Product Name - Prices from x to y'. This title can be edited in the settings. Important: You need to press the "Create variants" button to generate variants.
• Hybrid-generated price variants (default mode) - As you may guess from the name of it, this method is a combination of two others.  When a custom product is added to the cart, the app will check if there is already a variant with this price. If there aren't one - this new variant will be generated. In general, it will create new products just as Auto-generated does, but way less. This mode is the newest one, so it still may have some issues. In case you can't add your product to the cart, please switch to one of the other methods.

Auto-generate products on add to cart.

• Each time a custom product is added to cart a new simple product of with cpb_ordered type will be created in the store. This is useful for showing a custom product image in the checkout without shopify plus and offers support for complex products with lots of possible variants to be added to cart.

You can also preset the name for the auto-generated products

This product holds 1 price variant and contains all the selections made by the customer. If another customer adds to the cart - a new product will be created, even if the final price is the same.

Cart Example: 

Bulk removal of automatically created products from the catalog

You can also remove all obsolete auto-generated (cpb_ordered) products from your store with just a few clicks.

1. Open the CPB app.
2. Go to "Global Settings" and scroll down to the "Delete Auto-Generated Products" line.
3. Set the time period and click "Delete". All auto-generated products created during this time period will be automatically removed from your catalog.

For the automatization of this process, please contact our support.

You can check the following article to find out how to hide these cpb_ordered products from the storefront: Hide custom products

Pre-generate variants.

• This method calculates an approximate number of possible final price variants. These calculations are not ideal and may not take into account some conditional logic rules, you may have in your product. These variants, after they are generated, will be added to the cart. The limitation on the number of variants is 5000.

Please note, pre-generated variants won't work with features "Charge per character" (text input field), "Price Formulas. Open Office Calc", Input field Qty/Number, Additional price field option, Auto-Generated Dropdown, and if you add the weight to your choices. If you will select any of these options, you will be notified.

To turn this mode on:

• under Custom Product Builder product admin -> Settings -> Add to Cart Mode.
• Select Pre-generated variants
• Press "Create variants"

The limit for this option is 5000 variant price combinations. In order to fit into this limit for more complex products. The variants will be generated inside the main product and additional products that will have product_type = cpb_variants and they will have a title 'Custom Product Name - Prices from x to y'.

Inside those products will be stored price combinations.

Generating new products with type cpb_variants can take some time depending on the number of variants. If there are close to 5000 price variants - it may take several minutes.

In order to fit under 5000 variants please follow these strategies:

• Use more flat rates between option categories (customizations). For example instead of having 12.76, 13.21, and 15.54 USD for different options - choose one price for all of them (i.e. $14). This will only create 1 variant instead of 9 in this case.
• Split custom products with large configurations into 2-3 custom products with a smaller number of configurations based on some property.

Tip: you can set a name for pre-generated products in General settings as well as price range and counter.

Pre-generated variants don't have a custom image in the cart by default, but it can be added with the custom code, please check the following article

Please note, it is impossible to get custom image to the checkout with pre-generated variants due to restrictions from Shopify side.

Hybrid-generated price variants.

• As you may guess from the name of it, this method is a combination of two others.  When a custom product is added to the cart, the app will check if there is already a variant with this price. If there isn't one - this new variant will be generated.

The generated products will have type cpb_hybrid

Each product will have a range of 100, which means that the product from the screenshot will contain all variants from 100 to 199 (101, 102, 103 etc.). If the price is out of this range - a new product will be generated within the required range.

If a variant already exists - it won't be generated, which reduces the number of products generated in your store in compare with auto-generated variants.