Zend certified PHP/Magento developer

Create multiple Configurable Products that redirect to the Parent Product

How do I create a parent product with multiple variants e.g. Colour: Oak, Black Oak. Then have both show as individual products on the category page but when clicked, they direct to the parent page with the variant selected.

E.g. the category page were to have:

  • Large Black Oak Extendable Dining Table – Seats 6-8 – Jarel
  • Large Light Oak Extendable Dining Table – Seats 6-8 – Jarel

listed as 2 individual products on the category page and if a customer were to click the ‘Large Black Oak Extendable Dining Table – Seats 6-8 – Jarel’ it would take them to the parent product ‘Large Black Oak Extendable Dining Table – Seats 6-8 – Jarel’ (with the Black Oak option selected) where from there they could toggle between Black Oak and Oak variants.

Would the best way to do this, to use dynamic URLs for each product (which may also be better for SEO anyway as it would allow for us to index these as individual products) and then set the simple products as visible and redirect to the parent configurable product? The issue with this may be that the selectable colour swatches on the category page may not display under all products. Thus, does anybody know of an extensions that would allow for us to achieve this without a redirect?

We don’t want to create these as individual simple products as there will be occasions where customers will be looking to purchase a one of each variant together and so we want for them to add them to the cart from the same product page. We also don’t want to only display the parent product on the category page as the images for the different colours could lead to customers being confused over what they’d be purchasing at the time of searching the category page.

I have attached and image of how this should look on the category and product page here:

Example Category Page

Example Product Page

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!