So you want to set tier prices for product variants of configurable products in Magento. To achieve this you create a configurable product and associate your simple product variants based on your pre-defined attributes. At this point you start setting tier prices for your associated product variants, i.e. your simple products thinking that Magento will use these values on the frontend. Well, unfortunately in fact Magento by default only uses the tier prices set for the configurable product itself which obviously results in wrong prices in the frontend.
Surcharge to the rescue?
Ok, well let’s then use surcharges for product variants as basis for tier price calculations of product variants. Unfortunately, this also will not work since price calculations of tier prices for product variants only take the parent configurable product into consideration.
A concrete example
Let’s back up a little and have a look at the problem at hand with a concrete example. Imagine you want to sell t-shirts in different colors (green, blue, orange). For each color you want to set different base prices and in addition different tier prices. Have a look at the following table for clarification:
| T-shirt | 1 item | 3 items | 12 items | 24 items |
| green | 10 | 8 | 7 | 6 |
| orange | 11 | 10 | 9 | 8 |
| blue | 12 | 11 | 10 | 9 |
Prices are in EUR, e.g. 3 orange t-shirts cost 10 EUR each, whereas 3 blue t-shirts cost 11 EUR each. Again, by default Magento will use the tier price set for the product configurable product, thus ignoring tier prices set for product variants.
Magento extensions to use tier prices of product variants
This shortcoming of Magento’s default tier price handling for configurable products lead to the development of a handful of helpful extensions. One of the first ones on the market was Simple Configurable Producs (SCP), followed by the more advanced Better Configurable Products (BCP). Simple Configurable Products officially is not supported for the latest Magento 1.9.x series anymore. In fact, according to Magento Connect official support ended with Magento 1.5, although various people reported success with Magento 1.8 too.
Thus, you might want to use Better Configurable Products instead which is officially supported for the latest Magento EE and CE editions. Nevertheless, in case you want to save a little Configurable Products use Simple Price is cheaper but does the job just as well. No, I’m not affiliated with Configurable Products use Simple Price in any way. But after spending some time testing various extensions capable of using tier prices of product variants instead of the parent’s configurable product I’ve opted for Configurable Products use Simple Price for its price and functionality. Compared to Better Configurable Products Configurable Products use Simple Price is pretty simple with regards to the feature list.
To round up, in case you are just searching for a quick way to set tier prices for product variants of configurable products in Magento Configurable Products use Simple Price offers a quick and cost effective solution.
Grouped Products as alternative
Grouped products can also be used as alternative to the above mentioned extensions to correctly calculate and display tier prices in Magento. Of course, only if your product setup matches the required configuration for grouped products. For grouped products, tier prices are correctly calculated based on the values of the underlying simple products.
You can find a lot of information on the web concerning this issue in case you want to continue your search for alternative solutions. Hopefully, some day setting tier prices for configurable products correctly will become an integral part of Magento so we are not dependent on additional extensions for this (core) functionality.