ECommerce-Understanding products

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Prep the Store : Understanding products

Understanding products
Products are displayed in your store. Each product may have a single product variant or multiple product variants. But every product will have at least one product variant. The product variant is where the price, fee item, shipping and tax assignment is set.
If your product, a book for example, has both a hard cover and soft cover edition, you might create a single product called “book” but create a variant for the binding type, which is quite simple when using the “copy variant” selection which duplicates the information to a new variant. These two variants act like separate products in some ways, but like one product in others. A single product would display in your store but when selected, then it will display both variants with an Add to Cart button for each variant.
Note: the Product Template for this item must be set to “Variants in Grid” in order to display both variants. This is set on Catalog->Products->Manage Products. Edit your product and find the Product Template drop-down.
Typically, most products will have only a single product variant. And even in cases where there may be multiple sizes or colors, leading you to believe you need a variant for each of these combinations, you will find another option called Product Variant Attributes will be your best answer.
Product variant attributes allow you to create a single variant for your product but allows the customer to specify the color, for example, when purchasing by selecting from a list of possible colors. And in cases where both a size and color are required, a combination of attributes may be created and even setup so that customers are alerted if a certain combination is out of stock.
In any case, the foundation for selling products is a product with at least one variant.
Options for creating products:
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Create a product with a single variant (Example: Keychain with logo)
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Create a product with a single variant but with multiple product variant attributes (Example: Shirt with multiple colors and sizes)
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Create a product with multiple variants (Example: Book with both soft and hard cover options)
Other product ideas:
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Offer a downloadable product (Example: Organization Mailing labels)