How To Create A Variant Product?
To be able to create Variant Products in Tagrain, you must subscribe to and activate the Variant and Composite Product Management plugin.
Introduction
Variant products are those products that have an attribute, or a set of attributes bound to them. Some examples of attributes would be color, size, style, weave, etc. All Variant Products will have a parent product and the combination of attributes bound to them. It is this combination of attributes that creates a set of child products.
It is always a Child product that is sold on the Web Register and not the Parent product. For example, Polo T Shirt / Large / Blue is a product that has 2 attributes – Size and Color. These 2 attributes have their values. Possible values of Size attribute could be Small, Medium, Large. Similarly, the Color attribute could be Red, Blue, Green, etc.
Methods to create Variant Product
There are 2 methods to create a Variant product in Tagrain.
Method 1: You can add a Variant product manually on the Product Master Screen using the “Add Product” button.
Method 2: You can import a Variant product using the Excel upload.
Steps to create a Variant Product manually
To create a Variant type of Product you need to first specify the Parent product - for example a Polo T Shirt, its product code, its product group and then select its Product Type as Variant from the drop-down menu.
The Tagrain application is smart enough to automatically pick up a product code unless you want to specify it manually to match up your inventory line up convention. To specify the product code manually, you simply need to put a tick in the product code check box.
Selecting “Variant” from the drop-down menu activates another submenu called “Product Variants”. Here, you can specify the different attributes (size, color, etc.) and their corresponding values like Small, Medium, Large (for sizes) and Red, Blue, Green (for colors).
Three sizes in three colors creates a 3X3=9 possible combination of child products. Once all the entries are filled, you can click save to create these 9 products.
Variant Products are basically Standard Products that are bound with an attribute or a set of attributes. Just like you can define “Inventory Details – Selling Price, Stock Quantity, Reorder Level and Maximum Stock Level” for a Standard Product, you can define that for Variant Products too. You need to expand the Variant Product created and then individually edit the Standard Products (i.e., Variants) added therein. See: Inventory Section under Standard Products
Steps to create a Variant Product using Excel upload
Download the Excel Template from the Product List View. In this article we are going to use the demo data in the template as a reference to create new variant products. We will consider a product Men’s Polo T Shirt which comes in 3 sizes: Small, Medium, Large AND in 3 colors: Red, Blue, Green.
Three sizes and three colors result in 9 different variants of this Polo T Shirt.
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Small / Red
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Small / Blue
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Small / Green
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Medium / Red
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Medium / Blue
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Medium / Green
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Large / Red
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Large / Blue
-- Men’s Polo T Shirt / Large / Green
The Excel template downloaded from the Product List view is common for all types of products – Standard, Serial, Batch, Composite and Variant. To create a Variant Product, you are required to mark the main product (the parent product) by specifying its Product Type = 5 in the template.
The Excel template allows you to specify the different attributes (Size and Colour in this case) of this main / parent product. The attribute values are specified as comma-separated values in the Attribute value columns.
Tagrain allows you to define as many as 5 attributes with each attribute having 5 unique values.
Once you are done populating the main / parent product for its price, applicable tax, UPC Code (barcode) etc. you will now start populating the ‘child’ products in the excel template.
Please ensure to use a code that is unique for every child product.
Unless otherwise specified, the application will use the price defined for the ‘parent’ as the price for the ‘child’ products.
For every ‘child’ product, it is mandatory to specify the ‘parent’ code of the ‘child’.
The Product Type of the ‘child’ product need not be equal to 5. This is because a ‘child’ product is a standard product. It is the parent product that needs to be specifically categorized with Product Type = 5
It is a good practice to give a proper product description to the ‘child’ product.
At the time of exporting the products, you were presented with an option to include Stock Information as part of the download.
This stock information is to be entered in the Inventory Item worksheet of the Excel spreadsheet in which you have entered the product information.
The stock information includes Opening Stock Quantity, Re-Order Level and Maximum Stock level. This information is supposed to be entered for every item across all the stores.
Once the upload template is properly filled in, you need to click the import button on the Product Master Screen and navigate to the location where your Product.xls file is saved. Select the file and click OK to initiate the upload.
The application notifies when the data upload starts in the notification area. Once the data is uploaded, the application will again notify for the successful data import.
Suggested Readings
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