Magento Product Management

What is the goal of online business? To make sure your customer can find the product he/she needs based on updated product information that brings full description and other data related to the product. To achieve this goal of Magento product management you need to organize and streamline the information, prices, stock level, and other aspects of your products. Store Manager for Magento assists you in reaching this goal with a powerful managing system that helps you to handle with your online store inventory.

Products section shows you the list of products and their data organized in tables. You can arrange the way your products are displayed using filter by selected category, or show all grouped. It is very easy to make mass changes to your products using show all grouped filter as you can see all data at once. Helpful hints bring you all information you need to arrange your products view the way you need it.

Comfortable tool-bar with all basic and some extended options allows you to manage Magento products in your Magento store using main application. Or you can perform Magento Export products into Excel file, edit them and import updated data into Magento store. Also you can make other operations to manage Magento products: update your store product quantities, prices and other data using file from your supplier.

Before you begin to create products, let’s have a look at the different product types that Magento offers, and what these differences mean. In Magento, there are three product types that you can create: Simple, Configurable, and Grouped.

Let’s begin with Simple, because this is the foundation for both Magento Configurable Products and Magento Grouped Products. A Magento Simple Product is basically what its name indicates. It is the simplest type of product to sell on your website; one individual product, where the attributes are determined by the store owner. It will have system attributes (as all products require), and can have simple attributes as well. One example of a Simple Product would be a suit jacket. It is presented on your website as a standalone item, and as the store owner, you define that it is black, with three buttons on the front. When your customers arrive at the page for this product, they can see what the color and button count are in the product information section, their only option is whether or not to buy this item.

Magento Product Management – Configurable Product

A Magento Configurable Product, however, offers much more customer interaction. Let’s stick with the example of the suit jacket, because, as a Simple Product, is the foundation for a Configurable Product. In addition to this one suit jacket, you start to carry slightly different versions of the same jacket: a navy blue version, as well as one with four buttons on the front (in black and navy). You create three new Magento Simple Products (navy/three buttons, black/four buttons, and navy/four buttons), and if you only use the Simple Product feature, you would have four product pages, one for each combination of color and buttons. Using Magento Configurable Products, however, you can combine all four pages into one, so that your customer is guaranteed find the exact suit jacket they desire, while simultaneously making navigating your site as easy as possible. Once you have created the four Simple suit jackets, you can create a Configurable suit jacket, and associated all four simple products to it. You will not set the color or button count of the Configurable Product when you create it, but rather, your customer will set this when they purchase it. It is a Magento Configurable Product because your customers get to configure the attributes themselves. So, you can choose not to display any of the four Simple Products on you site, but rather only display the one Configurable Product. When your customers arrive at this page, instead of seeing the attributes listed in the product information section, they will see a drop-down for color (with options for black or navy) and a drop-down for button count (with options for three or four). The combination of attributes they choose determine which of the four Simple Products they are actually purchasing. The attributes point to the Simple Product, so that Magento knows which Simple Product to place in the order. The Configurable Product is therefore not a product at all, but rather a feature used to display multiple Simple Products on one product page.

Magento Product Management – Grouped Product

In this sense, a Magento Grouped Product is very similar to a Magento Configurable Product . It is also only a feature used to display multiple Simple Products on one product page. However, it displays them in a different fashion. Let’s again stick with the example of the suit jacket. Forget about the three new versions that you began to carry, and let’s go back to the classic black with three buttons design. Along with this suit jacket, you also sell matching slacks and vest, the venerable three-piece suit. Using Simple Products alone, you would have three separate pages, one for each piece. But you feel that these should be sold together, because they are part of a set. This can be easily accomplished using Magento Grouped Products. Simply create a Grouped Product – maybe you want to call it Three-Piece Suit – and associate all three Simple Products to it. On your website, the page for this Grouped Product will list all three Simple Products, each with its own quantity field. This way, your customers are alerted of the presence of the set, and even encouraged to buy the pieces together, however they still have the option to buy the pieces individually (you can actually force them to buy all three pieces together, but we will get into that later on).