Suppose you have a group of items you think will sell better together, like a SHOP THIS LOOK deal.   Maybe, you have a hat, scarf and gloves that all look great together and you want to offer them to your customers as a group.  They get a great look; you sell more items.

Luckily, QuickBooks accounting supports the creation of an item with a product type of ‘Grouped.’ One may then associate multiple child products, with individual quantities, to the grouped parent item. Thus, when the individual parent is selected on the QuickBooks invoice, like all of the associated child items are automatically added to the order. This feature of QuickBooks has been a tremendous time-saver for organizations utilizing such marketing-oriented groupings.

“When customers come to our site, they typically buy more than one item.  As an on-line retailer, I need to make sure I make it easy for them to add more items,”   says Lisa Foster, who runs two eCommerce carts, www.1bagatatime.com and www.snapsac.com.

The problem for Foster, and many online vendors, is that her accounting and shopping cart capabilities were out-of-sync.  Her Magento cart wasn’t configured to offer group items,, so keeping track of inventory, getting accurate data on what was paid for what, offering a group deal to encourage more spending, became messy.  The Magento eCommerce platform natively supports the concept ‘grouping’ to improve the customers’ buying experience, but carts of lesser complexity (and there are many) may never offer such functionality.
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