Now that you have already done the basic configuration of your store, it's time to start thinking about products. Magento has everything you could wish for built-in. But the extended possibilities also mean that you need to carefully plan and execute your product catalog. Therefore, we're using multiple chapters to explain Magento's product functions.
This chapter will cover:
Although Magento is preconfigured to immediately start entering your products, we recommend that you take some time to think about your product catalog before you do so. Of course it's easy to just start and see where you'll end up, but if you are serious about setting up your store, you must take some time to prepare it.
Let's first quickly have a look at the meaning of the various Magento keywords we'll use throughout this chapter:
All together you'll have complete control over your product catalog. And even if you are running multiple online stores using one Magento installation, it is still possible to use products in such a way that it isn't necessary to create any duplicate products, just because you would like to display different information in the various stores you are running.
Before you continue, remember that it is important to carefully think about your attributes and attribute sets. Once a product has been created, it's no longer possible to change the attribute set of that product! Besides that, your attributes will be used by visitors when browsing your store. Features such as Magento's famous layered navigation and comparison function heavily rely on a proper setup of your attribute sets.
Let's say that we are running an online store selling apparel, such as trousers, shirts, dresses, and shoes. We first have to create a logical category structure that makes sense for our visitors. Remember that your visitors will use your category structure to browse through your store and find the products they are looking for. So, try to think from the customers' perspective when creating your category structure.
Our example isn't very difficult, we see these kinds of online stores all the time and most of them are more or less following the same approach.
The following structure is what we could create. We kept the structure rather simple. Not everything will be in it yet, but this example is just used to explain what you can do using Magento:
This example shows you the category structure we created, but also shows some products in it, which have different attributes. To be able to create the products, we would need different attribute sets for every possible combination of attributes.