My clients always want a quick tutorial for attribute use and, unfortunately, it takes more than a few lines in a email to impart even the basic information.  So I’m skipping over the basic stuff and going straight to – wait for it – planning!  Before you even start entering attributes, you just have to plan your attribute use and entry.

For example, one shopping cart has a category for t-shirts.  Every t-shirt has a size and a color, but the sizes and colors can be different on each t-shirt.  One shirt might have small, medium and large; another might have medium, large and extra-large.  One shirt is available in red only and another is available in 3 other colors.

So the first thing to do is to group those shirts.  Turns out each t-shirt is available in medium and large.  Enter those attributes on one shirt and then you can copy that to all shirts in the category at one time.  Then go back and add in small to one shirt that has that size and you can then copy those attributes one at a time to each shirt that  it applies to. Do the same with any other sizes not added.

You can also do the reverse and put all sizes onto one shirt and copy to all shirts.  Then you only have to access the other products and delete the sizes not available for those shirts.  Sometimes that can be faster than adding the sizes to the shirts.

When you have a lot of products and a lot of attributes, you can see how complicated this can get!  So plan out your attribute entries for the most efficient use of your or your employee’s time