Products in Drupal Commerce 2.x

To the average person on the street, a product is something you buy. Say Joe Blow is looking for a t-shirt. Specifically, he wants a blue t-shirt with the logo of his favourite sports team on the front. He goes to an online store, selects the t-shirt with the appropriate logo, chooses the blue colour, and indicates the size he needs. Simple. He has now purchased a product.

But in the ecommerce world, a product is much more complicated.

Products: More than meets the eye

If you’re the owner of that online store, you know that every size of that shirt is an individual product that has its own SKU. Knowing whether someone ordered a large or small shirt is important for inventory (so you know how many you have left in stock), pricing (maybe you sell different sizes at different price points), and processing (so you know exactly what has to be shipped). Different colours are also different versions of the same product. So a “product” is really a collection of a whole bunch of products. But when your customers are viewing it, they think of the collection as a single product.

How Drupal Commerce 2.x handles products

In 2. x, you have attributes that are used to make up these different products. Each different colour is going to be a variation, and each different size is a variation, and each different size + colour combination is also a variation. So when you build attributes (size, colour, etc.), you actually build products.

You can also have customizations. If Joe Blow wanted his name on the back of that t-shirt, that isn’t really an attribute, because it doesn’t change the product stock. The store would just print his name on a standard T-shirt. That’s an option that gets applied to a product.

Commerce 2.x also lets you set product types to handle physical, digital, and subscription products differently (you don’t need sizes and weights and things for a digital good, for instance).

How this differs from Drupal Commerce 1

The main difference is that it’s more built-in now. In Commerce 1, there were variations, and then you built your own product by making a node (which was pretty confusing to many people). In Commerce 2.x, you set up a product, and add variations to it, and it’s a much more structured process that takes you through what you need to do.

The bottom line: products in Commerce 2.x is not vastly different; they’re more of an iterative improvement over Commerce 1.

To learn more, check out our High Five episode How Drupal Commerce 2.x handles Products.

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