Adding simple products in Magento

Attribute Sets:

Existing attribute sets are needed to create a simple product. In this example, we will use the “Default” set, but we have a few additional attributes added.

Now, we have to fill in several attributes for the product to successfully appear in your store.

Name, SKU, Price:

These 3 attributes are essential to create any product in Magento. This is clearly indicated by the red asterisk next to each attribute.

Products need a name so that customers can identify them. SKUs assists with inventory tracking and distinguishing products. An SKU is automatically created when giving the product a name. You can freely edit this SKU to match whatever naming convention you may have for your products' SKUs.

All items need a listed price for customers to see. Even if the item is free, customers will need to know that when browsing your products.

Quantity & Stock Status:

Having no quantity value and/or stock status is “not in stock” will prevent items from showing on the website. When your product quantity reaches zero it will automatically set the product as “Out of Stock”.

Weight:

No weight makes the product a “Virtual Product”. The difference between a “Simple” and “Virtual” product is that a customer would not need to input a shipping address for a Virtual product given it has no weight or location to be shipped to. Given we are entering details for a T-Shirt it would be safe to assume the product will have a weight and will not be a Virtual product.

Categories:

Here we will use one of the categories we have created previously. For a T-Shirt, we will use the “Shirts” category.

Images and Videos:

This section is where you can upload images from your computer. Where you can manually navigate your computer's directories for images or drag and drop a selected image into the page.

When you have added images you can select each image to fall into a specific image type. The available types are as follows:

Base - The main image that will show up o the product details page. This image should be the largest and highest quality image. This image can be clicked on and zoomed into if the image is larger than the image container.

Small - These images are often found on the homepage, category page, search result pages and New product list.

Thumbnail - This image will appear below the Base image in the product gallery, next to the product in the shopping cart, and in the related items section.

Swatch - These images are used in configurable products to show the varied images/products e.g. different coloured shirts.

Now you have some basic product data and images you should be able to save this product and see it appear in your store. Here is how this T-Shirt product came out for us:

This table will show all products and attributes that exist in your Magento setup. Here you can see the product image, name, type, attribute set, SKU, Price, quantity, store visibility, etc.

These are all of the steps you will need to follow to manually add a product to your Magento store. This will take a long time to repeat when having to add hundreds (if not thousands) of products for your store.

A solution to this problem is to link a PIM to your Magento store. Click here to find out more about how OneTimePIM can work with Magento!