Creating a basic product

- [Instructor] Once you've finished configuration in your general settings under stores configuration, you can go ahead and start adding products to your site. You do this by clicking on products over here in the side menu and catalog. We'll get this screen of course saying that we couldn't find any records because we haven't created any products yet. And as you can see we have a big orange button up here to add a product. If you click this down arrow, you'll see that we have a number of options here. For now, we're just going to go with simple product. So click on that. A simple product is just what it sounds like. One product with no extreneous options or maybe some customization at some points but basically whatever you see on the page is what you get, you click to purchase it and that item goes straight to your cart as is. So let's create an example here. So often, you may want to disable the product while creating it, especially if you're doing it on a live website so that way you can save it if you're unfinished and it won't be added to your store and people won't come across an incomplete product in your catalog. But for the purposes of this tutorial, I'm just going to leave this on. We're going to stick with the default attributes set for now and come back and cover attributes later on in our tutorial. So the first thing we're going to need is the product name. Let's make a sunrise mug. This is just a coffee mug that happens to be called the sunrise mug. We get an automatic SKU here. Sometimes I like to remove the spaces from my SKU. For the price, let's set this to $8.99. This will be a taxable good. And we need to tell the system how many we have in our inventory so it knows when to market as being sold out. Let's just say we have 300 of these in stock. Of course right now the status is in stock, we don't need to change that. I'm going to say that one of these mugs maybe weights 0.35 pounds. Notice we have the option over here to change this to this item has no weight. That would be for digital goods such as downloads that you may be selling. But of course, this is a physical product that does have a weight. Categories is something else that we're going to come back to later so just ignore that for now. Here we have the visibility option and in 99% of cases you're going to want to keep this as catalog search which is the default. That means you're product will show up in the store's catalog which is the main way that people will find products, and it will also show up when someone performs a search that that product would show up for. You can have it show up only in catalog or, particularly strange option would be only if someone does a search for it. But of course there are cases for anything so we have those options but this is a basic option that you want to use in almost all cases, catalog and search. You can set this product as marked as new from some calendar date to another. I'm going to go ahead and do that just to demonstrate. So we'll say that this is going to be marked as new from today, which for me is this date, and then maybe up until a month from now. So we'll go to December 28th. And so from this period in the system, the product will be marked as new and after this date it won't be marked as new anymore. And country of manufacture. Obviously that's just going to depend on where the product was made. I'm going to say that this was made in the United States. Then I'll go down and we have this content group here. We're going to have a description and a short description. Now both of these do show up on the same page. Description of course is a little bit longer, it will show up beneath the product. Short description shows up right next to the product to kind of give a quick idea, and then if someone scrolls down to view more then they get a fuller description. So for the full description, let's say... Now for the short description we might just take a little piece of the full description, maybe just something like... Next we have configurations which we're not going to worry about. That actually starts to get outside the scope of basic products. You can add configuration here and essentially change it from a basic product to something else. But again, we're just going to keep this basic. We'll come back and cover configurations later. Images and videos is going to be very important, particularly images. You want to obviously show images of whatever product you're selling. So to do that you'll click over here. And then grab the image file for your product. And upload it right here. Then I'll scroll down, and we have search engine optimization. This is not only for search engine optimization despite the title of this section. This will change the title of the product as it shows up on the tab of the browser, as well as how it shows up in search engines. Up here the URL key is the end of the path to this product. So it's going to be something, something, something, slash whatever you put here. Let's just go with sunrise, dash, mug. For meta keywords, these are not used a whole lot by search engines nowadays but it doesn't hurt to have them. So these are keywords that may apply to your product. So you can say coffee, mugs, coffee mug, colorful, modern, things like that. And then note. We have the full description here automatically added for the meta description. If it goes above 255 characters you're going to have to trim it some. Ideally it's going to be between 150 to 160. This may be a little bit long. Maybe we'll go ahead and remove this last sentence and we might even remove this sentence as well but I'll just keep it for now. Related products, up-sells and cross-sells. This is another group that we're going to return to later. But just to give you an idea, this is where you'll set various things to try to encourage customers to check out other products on your site as well. Related is kind of self-explanatory. There may be another similar product that can complement or replace this product if they don't quite like this one. Related can be sort of like an alternative solution. And up-sell and cross-sell, we'll go over those later. But that's just to give you a brief idea of what those are. Customizable options we're going to skip that for now and come back to that later as well, because we're going to keep this first product as basic and simple as possible. Here with design, most of the time you're not going to do anything here. You can change the design of this product as it compares to the default design of everything else, of all other products on your website. So this option would only be used if you have a product that, for some reason, you want to have a different layout on the page where it's displayed on the site. Here you would choose, again, one of these options to deviate from your site's default. And again this is not something you'll usually want to do but it does have its uses. You can display product options in a block after the info column or in the product info column. These are, again, for products with various options that you can set. We're not going to go over that right now. And you don't have to worry about layout update XML. Schedule design update. That's simply a time period that you can set to use a different theme than what may be the default, or a different layout. This is particularly useful for sales or seasonal things and stuff like that. We have gift options here. We're going to use the config settings which we will take a look at later on in this tutorial as well. But you do have the option to allow a gift message. If your config settings don't allow that then you can just deselect that and change this to yes. But again, we're going to keep things simple for now and just use the site's configuration settings. Finally, downloadable information. This is only for digital products so that's not something that we're going to worry about either. So we have all of the information that we need for our sunrise mug. Let's click save. And now let's take a look at this on the front end very quickly. Notice that if you click the drop down arrow next to your account name, you can get a customer view. I'm going to open this in a new tab. And it's not going to automatically show up on the front page, and currently we haven't really set up the way the catalog is going to appear or where it's going to appear on the site or anything like that. So for now, the best way to find this is just going to be to do a search. So I'm just going to type in sunrise and search for that. And here we have the search result with our sunrise mug. Let's click on that to view the full page, and this is what the page looks like. Here, we of course, have the image of the mug, the title, a link to review the product, of course the cost, the quantity that you want to purchase, the message that it is indeed in stock, we have the SKU right here, obviously an add to cart button and here is the short description that we were talking about, and down here is the full description. Note that for some products, and again, this is going to depend on what you're selling and what kind of information you need to relay to the customer. This detail section may be a lot longer in many cases, but for us, we didn't really need anything too long, just some basic information. And finally, look up here at the top of the browser. We have sunrise mug because that's what we put in the search engine optimization setting as our meta title, and then per the configuration for the rest of the site we have that suffixed with a space, a pipe character, a space and Coffee Bean Central, the name of our store. Here is our HTML key. This product is found at our domain, slash the information that we typed in for that, dot HTML. So now you know how to create a basic product using Magento. And now we've added the first product to our store.