Packaging Units feature overview

The Packaging Unit feature introduces a packaging unit that is a unit of measure used as packaging for a product. It allows including the amount of stock in a product a customer wants to buy. A shop owner can sell the same product in different packaging units—for example, apples can be sold as an “Item”, a “Bag”, or “Pallet” of apples. The “bag”, “pallet”, and “box” are referred to as packaging unit types.

Each packaging unit is defined on an abstract product level and is represented by one product variant—for example:

Leading products

The leading product represents the relation between two concrete products and holds the availability. The measurement unit, defined on an abstract product level, is the stock unit for all the concrete products of the abstract product. A group of products in a packaging unit, that has a leading product, is called a product packaging unit group. Each packaging unit includes a certain amount of products by default (default amount). A shop owner can choose whether the packaging unit—for example, a bag, has a separate stock or shares stock with the contained item. In our example, the different product variants have their own SKUs and prices, but they represent the same physical product in the warehouse. To share the information about availability among these variants, we use the concept of a leading product.

However, leading products are not always relevant. Packaging units that represent a package of items whose quantity can not be changed, do not need a leading product. In this case, the availability of the packaged items themselves, not individual items in the package, matters. Such packaged products actually behave like normal abstract products for which customers might have a possibility to select applicable sales units see Measurement Units to learn about product sales units). Basically, when a packaging unit does not use the leading product, it means that the stock is not shared.

To reflect the availability of a leading product for a packaging unit and to define which concrete product SKU is the leading one, the lead_product_sku attribute is used.

The shop owner can define various sales units for the packaging units. For example, for a chocolate bar, the base unit could be set to item, and the sales units could be a box, packet, or gift box with a variable or fixed amount of chocolate bars in them.

Read on to learn about the product packaging unit amount options.

Product packaging unit amount

A packaging unit usually contains multiple items of a product. For example, a “Bag of apples” can contain 10, 20, or 40 apples. This information is called the amount of a packaging unit.

The packaging unit amount can be:

The following schema shows relations between products, packaging units, their types, and amounts:

All packaging units having leading products have a base unit of measure and can also have various sales units reflecting the number of items in the packaging units.

The amount of items contained in a sales unit is referred to as sales unit amount. If a customer chooses a sales unit amount, which is in between two available amounts (due to amount restriction settings), a higher or lower amount must be selected.

When the very same item is added to the cart with a different amount of sales units or with the same amount but a different sales unit, the item appears in the cart in the form of separate items.

Stock calculation and definition

In Spryker Commerce OS, customers can buy a product defined by the following elements:

• Quantity. The number of times a customer adds the product to cart.
• Amount (only for packaged products). How many items the packaged product contains.

The stock will then be calculated as follows: Reserved stock = Quantity x Amount

The Quantity value will always be an integer. It is used to split the ordered products into sales order items.

For example, a customer wants to purchase 3 mobile phones. In terms of Spryker OS, 1 mobile phone is bought 3 times. In the Back Office, you’ll see the order split into 3 sales order items: sales order item #1 with 1 mobile phone, sales order item #2 with 1 mobile phone, and sales order item #3 with 1 mobile phone. This lets you refund each mobile phone separately.

Products with a decimal value in the stock

The shop owner can also define stock in a decimal value—for example, 2.5, 5.65, 0.75.

For example, you define your stock as kilogram and have in stock 400.50 kg salmons. Each salmon weighs 2.5 kg. A customer wants to buy 10 salmons. If you consider each salmon to be a usual concrete product in your system, you will end up with a wrongly calculated stock. Since according to the formula, the customer buys 1 (amount) salmon 10 (quantity) times, which equals 10. To define a proper relation between your stock and what your customers can purchase, you need to use the Packaging Unit feature, which will convert salmons into packages: 1 salmon = 2.5 kg = 1 package. So, when your customer buys 10 salmons, you get the correct calculation: Quantity (10 packages) multiplied by Amount (2.5) equals 25 kg of stock.

Packaging Units scenarios

This section shows the scenarios of when the Packaging Units feature can be used.

Case 1. Products are sold as a package containing some fixed amount of stock

In this example, we sell Atlantic salmon as a package containing 37.44 kg of fish and set a price per kilogram. 37,44 is the default value for the Amount field. Here your customer can change only quantity but cannot select the Amount value, because Amount is not a variable in this case.

Thus, when the customer wants to buy 3 packages of fish, it means that they buy 3 packages with 37,44 kg per package.

To calculate stock, Quantity is multiplied by Amount (the default value). The resulting value will be subtracted from the current stock.

Case 2. Products are sold in measurement units, the amount of stock is variable

In this example, we sell potatoes as kilograms and, thus, set a price per kilogram. Potatoes are sold as a package containing 1 kg (the default value for the Amount field). However, a customer can select how much potatoes they want to buy per package because Amount has been defined as a variable. In our example, the customer decided to buy 2 packages with 2.5 kg per each.

Case 3. Products are sold with shared stock enabled

In this example, we can sell VGA cables as items (ring) and meters (as long as you want). The price has been set per meter. We define that VGA cables share their stock with VGA cables as long as you want. It means that the leading product for VGA cable has been set to the VGA cable as long as you want product packaging type.

If a customer selects Ring, they can set only quantity (in our example, 3) because Amount has not been specified as a variable.

After the customer places the order, in the Back Office, we see the following:

• Availability for the leading product (VGA cables as long as you want) decreased by 4.5 (amount of reserved products)
• Availablity for the non-leading product (VGA cables) decreased by 3 (quantity of reserved products). Then, the customer decided to select the As long as you want packaging unit type. In this case, they can set quantity and specify how many meters or centimeters of cables there will be in the packaging unit amount. This is possible because Amount is a variable for this packaging unit type.

In our example, the customer set the meter for a sales unit, selected 3.5 for the Amount field and 2 for the Quantity field. The default value for “As long as you want” is set to 0.5.

Once the order has been placed, we can navigate to the Back Office and see the following:

• Availability for the leading product (VGA cables as long as you want) decreased by 11.5 (amount of reserved products)
• Availability for the non-leading product (VGA cables) didn’t change from the previous time. The following figure shows how these items and packaging units appear in the cart.

In our example, the following conditions are met:

• We put different packaging units into the cart.
• The products have different sales units.
• The amount has different sales units.
• There are products with a fixed and a variable amount of stock.

Current constraints

• In the Spryker Commerce OS, you cannot define packaging units for products in the Back Office. They are imported to the database manually. See HowTo: Import Packaging Units for more details.
• We strive to shift all business logic to our backend, however, with Packaging Units, calculations are performed on Yves.
• On the shopping cart as well as the shopping list page, products do not have a drop-down to change the packaging units. You can select a packaging unit on the product details page only.
• A shopper cannot reorder the items with the selected packaging units as they are not added automatically. They must be added manually on the product details page.
• In the Quick Order form and search widget, the products use the default packaging units that cannot be changed. Flexible packaging units are not supported on the Quick Order page.

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