How to create a base product price in which variants pricing is added to the (base) price

Site URL: http://www.specialist-trackers.uk

Hi there,

I wondered if anyone could help with my dilemma. 

I want to be able to set a base product price for some (most) of my products with my product variants adding to this base price when selected.

My specific scenario is that I sell vehicle tracking systems, I need a base price for my product and then the customers will need to select a subscription term for the product (mandatory)

I want to set a base product price to lower the price displayed in search engines (as this is what other competitors are doing) After all, if my product is shown in Google search results priced at £699 (base price plus a 'mandatory' 1-year subscription say) but my competitor is showing the same product (on google search) at £449 (without a subscription) then customers are drawn to the lower price even though they'll need to still purchase a subscription with the competitor too. 

I need a product base price to be competitive in Google search results and to avoid potential customers opting to click through to a competitor's site due to a (misleading I know) but lower price.

My problem is that you can't seem to set a base price and then have say 2 variants of the product. Essentially the product price I set disappears when I add variants, in which the actual product price is set at the lowest value of those two variants. 

At the moment my setup has me adding two variants (but there can be more) a 1 year subscription and a 3 year subscription. One way around this was to just add the base price literally as 'base price' in the variant section and add the price I want my product to display in search results to it . However it's not very clean and may be and may be confusing for customers as I have to set the 'base price' variant as 'out of stock' to ensure customers don't accidentally purchase it. It's just not great, its not intuative plus it doesn't look great either.

Surely there are other businesses that are in a similar predicament with their products?

My site is still being developed, I'd recommend you visit the page - 'Shop all' and select a product called 'Meta Trak S5 Deadlock PRO+' to see my latest efforts at resolving my issue.

Site - www.specialist-trackers.uk

Password - Nala1033

Thanks in advance Steve