Child Products - What are they and how do I set them up?
What are child products? This is often asked and more importantly, how do I create them? So what are child products? Child products belong to a parent product. The parent product can never be bought, it is just a container for a product e.g. You have a product that can be bought as a physical product and a downloadable product (Such as an audio CD).Using normal products you would then have 2 duplicate products, essentially the same, the only difference; one is downloadable the other is physically delivered. So in your browse page you would have 2 products the same. Using child products, you would create a a parent product which has all the relevant information and images. You would then create 2 child products. The first being a physical product with a price of say $10, then you would create a second child product. This would also have a downloable file associated and a price of $5. So when the customer now selects the parent product, they will have 2 choices. 1 buy the physical product pay for shipping and await delivery or buy the downloadable product finish the checkout and recieve a download link.
This is just one example. The next section I will explain how to set up child products.
So, how do we set up a product to become a parent product?
1. Create your product.
Create your product as you would any other product. This would include a base price or lowest price, include your description any images etc.
2. Add Atribute.
There are 2 ways to do this. If you are editing the product select add attribute from the icons.
Or slect the products menu as below.
This will bring up a screen for entering the attribute name. Below is the update screen, this is the same as the screen to add a new item.
You can do this as many times as you like e.g. you could also add another one for size. See Next Page
Once this has been done you can go on to the next step.
3. New Item
Once all the attributes have been added you can then start to create child products. Edit your parent product and you will see a new icon in the toolbar.
and a menu item
Either of these options will add a new child item to the parent product.
The next step is to eneter the relevant info for the child product.
This is explained on the next page
There are only 3 things that have to be entered. These are the product SKU and the product title. Obviously the SKU has to be unique as this is an individual product with its own stock levels etc. The title can be same the same as the parent product or something else. As you can see below there is no category selection. It is taken from the parent so is not needed.
The next thing to do is to select the item status tab.
The Item Status tab is where you would extra attributes. The normal attributes are not used here for the child product but, they can be used to alter the child product. For now though, it is better to ignore them.
If you scroll down the page you will see the new field/s. As in my example I added 2 attributes there are 2 new fields!
As you can see 2 new Item Attributes, as you can see I have crossed out the attribute list and custom attribute list. This just to show that these have nothing to do with creating a child product. Now the Item Attributes are filled in for this child product. So if this item is red and small, you would enter.... red and small!
You would then add any extra info you need, such as stock levels, size, price, downloadable file etc that applies only to this child and save.
If you wanted to add another child which is say blue and medium. then you would create another child product by selecting new item or if you were on the page that displays the child products just by selecting new from the toolbar and follow the procedures on this page for the next product etc.
I hope that explains a little bit about what child products are and how they are created. Obviously you have to create a new child for every item, you cant enter, for example, red,blue,green in the Item Attributes Color field and expect VM to create 3 child products. It will not, you would have to create a product for red then another for blue and then another for green.
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