Manage Products in the Back-Office 

Hint

This section is part of the Product Management topic that provides a general understanding of the product concept in OroCommerce.

The flow for creating and managing products may vary depending on the needs of your business, whether you have small-scale operations or complicated product characteristics and visibility settings. With the help of OroCommerce flexible product management system, configuring products is simple to achieve. However, it may not be obvious where to start. This section is here to guide you through the process and refer you to suitable topics.

Prepare for Product Creation 

OroCommerce supports both product attributes and product families. Product attributes are configurable parameters for a product, such as product size, color, brand, name, inventory status, and the like. They can be arranged into a product family, a group of related attributes to be displayed as a titled section at the OroCommerce storefront. Both product components are used when creating simple and configurable products. A special price attribute helps you store the price-related information that may be easily reused when you plan the prices on the website.

With this information in mind, here are the references to the elements that need to be created and/or configured before you proceed to create an actual product in OroCommerce:

  • Create product units — to select the primary product unit and its precision.

  • Create product families and product attributes — to design a structure for product information and give the product-specific characteristics, such as color or size.

  • Create price attributes — to add custom parameters where you can store the price-related information (e.g., MSRP) that may be used in the rule-based price lists to calculate the price for the buyer.

Create Your Products 

Next, you can proceed to create products. You can create three types of products in OroCommerce, simple, configurable, and a product kit.

Simple products are physical items that exist in a primary, single variation. Their qualifiers, such as color or size, cannot be modified, meaning customers cannot select the same product with slightly different characteristics. Simple products have a unique SKU and serve as ‘building blocks’ for configurable products.

Unlike a simple product, a configurable product is an item available in multiple variations. Customers ‘configure’ the product in terms of its color, size, or any other applicable parameters according to buying needs. A configurable product with all its different attributes (e.g., size and color variations) is displayed in the storefront as a matrix ordering form.

A product kit is an assortment of products, each with their individual SKUs. Each product in this assortment bundle can be mandatory or optional for the buyers to buy in order to proceed though the checkout. An example of a product kit would be a lamp with a selection of optional accessories for it, such as spare bulbs of different wattage.

Note

Product Kits in the back-office are available as of 5.1LTS. Product Kits in the storefront are available as of 5.1.3. By default, the product kits feature is disabled for v.5.1 but you can enable it with developer assistance in the yaml file of the ProductBundle.

Control Your Products 

Once you have created products, you can: