Product types

If you think about products—the various products you do or want to sell online—you may quickly realize that your items are more complex than they seem at first glance. In fact, most products you can buy online require more than simply a photo, description, and price.

Let's explore the idea of product types for a moment, as it not only shapes the contents of this chapter, but may also give you some creative ideas.

Simple products

If you shop online for a ballpoint pen with blue ink, you could well find a list of pens where each ink color is a separate product. The individual pen products would be considered Simple products.

In Magento, we think of a Simple product as one for which there is a single Stock Keeping Unit (SKU). If the blueink pen has an SKU of PEN1234BLU, then we would build it in Magento as a Simple Product.

Simple Products can have custom options, though. For instance, we could offer this blueink pen in different ballpoint sizes, but with a Simple Product, we cannot...