How to Create Configurable Products
I’m going to do a quick video today on how to create configurable products in Magento. Now a configurable product is like you see on a lot of the E-commerce sites – it is one product, it has drop downs for different options that you’d like to select for that one product. It’s actually multiple products and today I’m going to show you how to do that with a T-shirt. This T-shirt is first in Magento, you need to create all these products as simple products. These are actually already in this client’s admin panel, they already have all these in here but they don’t know how to create the configurable.
Configurable Products Attribute Creation
That’s the first step is just go ahead and create your simple products just like you normally would with the different sizes. And actually a more important step before that is to set up your attributes. So if your configurable options are going to be like color and size, you can make sure you have those in the attributes. So let’s go ahead and see what we’ve got here in the attributes. If you don’t have these (which they don’t come by default for Magento) you’re going to have to add them in here. But for these instances, we’re going to have color and size.
So you can see these are already in here. If you go to the color you’ll see all the different labels that are in here. All the different colors are here, the color options, this is where you would add all your color options. Say later on you had a new color that you want to add here, you would come to this attribute – Attributes > Manage Attributes. Go to color and go ahead and add your color in here. Give it a name (an administrative name) and then this is the name that is going to display on your site. Go ahead and add all those in there. If this was a new attribute, you want to make sure to make it for a configurable product.
There’s a couple of things you need to make sure you put here. One of these is that scope is going to be “global”. These unique values you generally want that to “no” because other products are going to use the same colors. Values required – No , typically not because when you’re making products they might not need to have this configurable product attribute filled out. “Apply To” and then the other important thing is the “Apply To” you want to apply this to simple products and configurable products – definitely. And of course “use to create configurable product”. The other important item here is “drop down”. Only certain types of attributes can be used for configurable products.
This one is already set to “drop down” which is what we want. Very important things – “scope”, “catalog input” drop down, the product type that you’re going to apply to, and “use to create configurable product” = yes. All these other items are just kind of for different aspects that we’re really not going to deal with right now.
This is set up correctly and the same goes for the size. If we go look at size, size is already set up correctly. We see the same thing. “global” , “drop down”, apply to “simple” and “configurable”, “use for configurable product” = yes and of course the sizes. So like I said, after that is set up and you’ve added that attribute to your attribute set (in this case it’s uf). You need to make sure you add that attribute from your unassigned attribute to your groups some where. As you can see their here (color and size).
Ensure simple products are created
After you’ve done that and re-indexed then you are going to create all these simple products, and create just the different sizes. You’re going to have a large purple/yellow, you’re going to have a medium purple/yellow, you’re going to have a small purple/yellow. You have to go through and create all the custom options as simple products and depending on how many different configurations you could have, you might have quite a bit of simple products to create. We’re going to assume that you know how to create a simple product and not really touch on all that right now. But the important thing is that when you are creating one that is going to be assigned to a configurable product is those attributes we spoke about, which is the color and the size. You want to make sure that you have that set correctly for each simple product.
Creating the Configurable Product
OK so now that all the simple products are set up, we’re going to go ahead and create our configurable products. So go to add product. You’re going to have to select the correct attribute set. Now this is important that your simple products and also your configurable product use the same attribute set. In this case it’s “uf”. Then you’re going to do a product type of configurable. So we’ll go ahead and get this started. What I like to do is, when your doing this, is to actually have two tabs I’ll show you why in a second once I get past this screen.
Now it’s asking what configurable attributes are we going to use. We’re going to use the ones that we had set up the “color” and the “size”. We want to do both because we want to have two drop downs on this product for these options. Go ahead and go “continue”. Now the reason I like to have two tabs is now look at all this empty space we have to fll with the product information. So if you click on one of your simple products, it’s a great way to grab what you already have and just kind of paste it in here. Obviously we need to get rid of that.
Go ahead and just copy and paste, this is depending on that you already have that information filled in your simple product. And for this for sku, I generally like to make a note that it is a configurable product. This is not going to show up in the shopping cart, this is just for Magento admin to have a sku to assign it. Ultimately it’s going to use the sku of the simple product that’s added to the cart when it checks out.
Go ahead and “status” = enabled. Going to breeze through a lot of this stuff considering, you’ve create a simple product, you’re probably familiar. “Sort order” this is a custom attribute on this customer’s site so we’re not going to touch on that but I just need to fill it in because it is “required”. “Prices” – with a configurable product you want to start with the lowest simple product price. These are all the same, so we’re just going to go with 25 but if these were different we would use the lowest price. I’ll show you why later. Go ahead and get that price in there, 25, and the taxable goods class.
“Meta Information” now we’ll see if there is anything in here we need to bring over, and there is. Go ahead and get your images in there. I’ve actually already downloaded this image, so I’ll go ahead and get that up there. Click your “base image”, “small image”, “thumbnail”. Design – we shouldn’t have to touch anything with that. Inventory – We definitely want to make sure that it is “in stock”. Category – we are going to add it to the correct category. Kind of breezing through this like I said I’m assuming everybody watching knows how to create a simple product.
Assigning the associated products
The important part is we want to tell it what the associated products are. Since we know already the name of these, we can go ahead and type that in. There’s the products we want to associate, so we’ll just go ahead and check them. You’ll notice as I’m checking them it’s populating stuff above the grid (and I’ll touch on that later).
This is where if you had different pricing you could address it here. Now this is all based off of the base price. $25 is the base price. I mentioned you need to make sure that if you have different pricing, that this price is the lowest price of all the items. The reason why is because for the associated products, say you had a different cost for these size.
You could say this one is going to be an additional $10. This one is going to be an additional $5, on top of the $25. But since we don’t we’ll just leave these empty and we’re all set with our information and we can save it.
Confirm it’s working correctly
Now that it’s saved we can go to the front end and see if it is showing, and how it is showing. So we’re going to go ahead and find this product here. And there it is, this is the configurable product that we just created. If we click on it we’ll see how it’s presented. Now you can see on this site, there are some issues with the way it is being presented. That is because this site, and many other custom designed sites, are designed around simple products. When you add a different product type, sometimes there can be formatting issues that need to be addressed, just for configurable products. And that looks like it’s going to be the case here.
We still should be able to test this out, and make sure that we can add this product to cart. And there we go. We’ve got the configurable product, selected this simple product using the options on that configurable product page and you can see we’ve got the correct product in our cart.
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