How to add a configurable product for Magento with TigerMin
Note: I assume you already know what configurable products are, and why to use this. If not, I advise you Google for more information before reading this post.
Adding configurable products with Magento is quite a tough job. It involves a lot of steps, lot of waiting and it is quite complicated. Well, we made adding configurable products way more simple. Click the link below to expand some information about the time-saving features, or scroll down to skip this and get started directly.
How to add configurable products from a – z
First of all, as you hopefully now, a configurable product is associated with (multiple) simple products. So, you would sell a configurable product, let`s say ‘T-shirt’. It is associated with multiple simple products like ‘T-shirt red’, ‘T-shirt green’, etc. These simple products have their own stock and sku.
So in order to create a configurable product, you would need to create simple products first. I will now step by step guide you through creating simple products and configurable products, but I would highly recommend you checkout our introduction video to get a visual tour through the basics of TigerMin. After watching this video, the steps below will make a lot more sense.
Start the introduction video!Quickly jump to:
Adding simple products with custom attributes
So let`s get started, first of all, we want to add a few simple products with custom attributes. In this example the custom attributes will be ‘T-shirt size’ and ‘T-shirt color’.
- Go to configuration > configure forms (in this section you can add unlimited form setups, when adding products you can choose which form setup you want to use)
- Clone the default form, or add a new one
- Give it a name, for example: ‘T-shirt attribute set’
- Now the form configuration will load with a default set of attributes, in this form configuration we are going to add our custom attributes ‘T-shirt size’ and ‘T-shirt color’.
- Click the button ‘add new attribute’ in the bottom of the form
- Now a new row is added to the form, you can now either choose a attribute via the icon next to the input field (1), or type your attributecode directly (2).
- So, in this case I type tshirtsize, because that is the attribute code I have used in Magento. In the other configuration fields next to this first input you can configure several settings like the appearance width on the form, a default value, whether you want this attribute in the product add and/or edit section, and you can drag & drop the inputs order.
- Now repeat steps 5 – 7 for the second attribute ‘T-shirt color’.
This is it, you have now created your own form with custom attributes. TigerMin will automatically recognize the type of attribute, for example if it is a date attribute, TigerMin will show a datepicker, if it is a select / dropdown attribute, TigerMin will show a selectbox, etc.
Now go to Product Management > Add Products and choose your just created form from the list in the selectbox next to ‘Attributeset’:
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You newly created form will now load and show the added custom attributes:
So, with this form you can easily add multiple products in one screen and save all the data you want for the product.
Adding the configurable products
Now we have created a few simple products, we are going to create our configurables. To do this, we must again create a form to add a few fields we need to associate the simple products, choose which attributes are used for the configurable products, define super attribute pricing, etc. You can of course extend the form you just created for the simple products, or you can create a new form. Choose whatever works for you, in this case we are going to create a new form.
- Go to configuration > configure forms (in this section you can add unlimited form setups, when adding products you can choose which form setup you want to use)
- Clone the default form, or add a new one
- Give it a name, for example: ‘Configurable products’
- Now for a configurable products there are a few fields that don`t really matter, for example the stock qty is irrelevant so you can delete that from the form.
- Furthermore, you want to change the ‘type_id’ field (which is required for every form you create) to ‘Configurable’ so Magento recognizes your products as configurable products.
- Now we are going to add a few attributes required to setup our configurable products.
- Click the button ‘add new attribute’ in the bottom of the form
- Now a new row is added to the form, click the icon next to the input to open a list of available attributes
- Scroll down until you see the line starting with ‘configurable attributes’
- We want to add these three attributes, so repeat step 8 and 9 to add all three
- Once you are done, save the configuration and go to Product management > Add products
- Now choose the just created form as attributeset to work from
- Your form will load and it will have all functionality required to successfully add configurable products, super easy & fast.
Please note that these three columns are showing up here because you have added them to the form configuration in step 8 – 10.
- So, with the first column (Configurable attributes) you can choose what attributes are configurable for this product, in our case these were ‘T-shirt size’ and ‘T-shirt color’.
- The second column (Associated simple products) will show a popup (when you click the button) with a list of simple products. You can easily associate these simple products with the configurable product you are now adding.
- The last column (Custom attribute pricing) will open a popup where you can define pricing for all attributes values. For example, if you want size XL to be discounted with 20% you can define it here.
So that was it, you can now click the button ‘Add new product’ as many times as you like, and add configurable products in one simple overview.
I know that this post contains quite a bit text, and probably now you have read this you might think ‘it is still so many steps’ but trust me, it is easy. In this post we are explaining everything, from configuring your own forms until creating the configurable products. But please make sure to try this all out in our already created forms on our demo environment. You will see that adding products is easy, simple and way faster then you will ever be able to with standard Magento backend functionality.
I hope you enjoyed this post, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any question. Thanks for reading and make sure to check out our other posts.
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Thanks for sharing this post, Now i am well trained about adding configurable products in magento with Tigermin!
Well done!