Now that you have a category (or categories) created, it’s time to add in your products. If you jumped here and have not yet created categories, you’ll need to go back and do that first. The Magento system requires that every product be assigned to a category when it is created. Even if you will have only one product in a given category, it is still mandatory to create a category for that product.
From the dashboard of your Magento control panel, hover your mouse cursor over the “Catalog” link and select “Manage Products” from the drop-down menu. You will now be directed to a menu where you can add, edit, or place several properties or information about your product(s).
From this window, click on the “Add Product” button located on the top-right side of your “Manage Products” window. The image shown below displays no current product(s) on the inventory.
However, this is the same location where your existing products are displayed and can be updated.
After clicking the “Add Product” button, you will be prompted to choose two of your product’s settings: “Attribute Set” and “Product Type.” There are several options under “Product Type.”
However, for this illustration, we will be choosing “Simple Product.” Then click on “Continue.”
The window that appears next is the new product information window. Under the “General” tab, fill in the fields with their corresponding information. The red asterisk on the field names means it is required and cannot be left blank or without any value:
SKU — This is a value that you can place that will point to the product you are placing. The value
“0001” is an example — you may also use an alphanumeric value here if need be.
Visibility — This determines where this product can be found. “Catalog” means the product can be found from the front end or your store front. “Search” means your product can be listed from the search field from the front end. If not selected, the search queries will not list this item of the search results. What is selected above is “Catalog, Search”, which means both settings are on.
In Feed — The options available are Yes/No, and specify whether you would like to include this product in your website store’s RSS feed.
Set Product as New from Date/to Date — This is an option to display your product as “New.” You can use this to feature your latest product on the site. “Set Product as New from Date” is the starting date and “Set Product as New to Date” ends the product featured as new. Leaving the date blank will
let your product simply be added to your inventory. This is a great feature if you have a hot new product (such as the iPad 3) that you want to prominently display on your site.
After filling in the “General” information, click on “Prices” next. It will display another form like the one below.
Fill in the necessary fields for the price of your product. You’ll notice that you can run sales specials on a product by entering in the sale price and the dates for which that sale is active. If you want to track the margins on your products and sales, enter in your cost in the form for each product on this page.
NOTE We’ll cover reporting in a future post.
Finally, if you have tiered pricing based on either a customer group or on the quantity purchased, you can use the “Tiered Pricing” field to fill in that information.
You’ll notice that Google Checkout is the default payment option on this page. In the next chapter, we’ll look at integrating PayPal into the payment process, as well as some additional payment options.
The next tab is “Meta Information.” It’s important to fill this out because this information can make it known on the Internet that you have this product in your website store.
For the “Meta Title,” you may simply enter the Product’s name, just like in the “General” information page. Fill in “Meta Keywords” with several descriptive words of your product. For the “Meta
Description,” enter a brief description of the product. It has a maximum of 255 characters.
After filling in the information fields, click on “Images.”
The “Images” tab displays the form where you may upload images of your product. The image below indicates there are already image files ready to be uploaded. Click on the button “Browse Files” to open a window to search and select the image(s) of your product. In this example, three images are selected and ready to be uploaded. If you have uploaded the incorrect image, simply click the
“Remove” button to remove the image from the upload list.
After clicking the “Upload Files” button, the files will now be uploaded to your store. If the upload is successful, it should be able to display them as shown in the next image.
The three sample images that were uploaded can be used as a “Base Image,” “Small Image,” and
“Thumbnail.” All three may also be used for one of these options. The label may differ and it is best to specify where each image is used — or, in this case, what it is about. It will help you keep the images straight when you come back to the product.
The next tab we will cover is the “Inventory” tab. These settings include the “Stock Availability” and the quantity (Qty) of the product which, is a required field.
The checkbox below each field indicates whether you will be using the feature, as shown below.
The next step is the “Categories” tab, where we will choose what category our product falls under.
The sample images we used are logos from some software. As a sample, we will click on the
“Computer Software” category.
As you notice, we choose categories using checkboxes. That means we can select multiple categories for our product under all the categories where it applies. After choosing which category in which to place the product, you may now click on the “Save” button. This will lead you to the “Manage
Product” window that now displays the item or product in the list.
From this point, we can continue editing the product we entered or add a new one. We can also check to see if the product we entered displays from the front end by going to the main page of our store. If we see the product there, then we successfully added the product into the system. If not, we need to go back to the “Manage Products” page to see if we might have missed a field or a setting.
The first image below shows our store view after clicking the “Computer Software” category, where our product is placed. The second image is the details view, after we click on the product from its main category to get more information.
Wrapping Up
In our next article, we’re going to look at how to take payment, and integrate PayPal and a few other payment options into Magento. In the meantime, get your products entered into the system and ready to go.
About the Author
Travis Robertson is a peak performance coach and business strategist. He writes about
entrepreneurship, leadership, and millennials on his blog TravisRobertson.com. You can follow him on Twitter @travisro, where he spends far too much time.
Chapter 13. Magento, Part 3: Accepting PayPal Payments
Travis Robertson
Magento is an extremely powerful, open source ecommerce platform that was recently acquired by eBay, the parent company of PayPal. In my current series of articles, I’m covering Magento’s various components and how you can make use of the platform for your own ecommerce needs.
In Part 1 of this series, I took you step by step through the installation and setup of Magento. I pointed out some of the gotchas along the way and the various configuration options available to you. When we were done, we had a working (albeit a rather plain) ecommerce site set up.
In Part 2, we looked at getting products into your new Magento store. We discussed how Magento organizes products and inventory into categories and subcategories, and covered some of the potential configuration options. In that article, I also gave you some homework: getting your products into your new system so that we can begin the process of accepting payment.
And that’s where we find ourselves today. After all, what good is a store if you have a whole bunch of products and no way to accept payment for said products? Not very good at all. We’re not running a charity (unless, of course, you are running a charity). So now we’ll look at accepting payment in your new Magento installation.
In this article, we’ll be configuring PayPal for payments and walk step by step through the process of getting it set up. Obviously, there are myriad ways you can accept payment, and to discuss them all here would make for a very long article. Covering this option should give you a pretty good idea of the system’s basics and allow you to explore alternatives that make sense for your particular situation.
Remember, Magento is very flexible and allows you to set up multiple payment options. There really is no limit to how many ways you can take payment in your site.