Category or an Attribute?

Some things are clearly Categories. For example, if you have an electronics store, MP3 players would make a good Category. If you're selling jewelry, earrings would make a good Category.

Other things are clearly Atributes. Color, descripNon, picture, and SKU number are almost always Atributes.

  

SomeNmes, the same thing can be used for a Category or an Atribute. For example, suppose your site sells shoes. If you made size an Atribute, then aGer your shoppers have located

a specific shoe, they can select the size they want. However, if you also made size a Category, the shoppers could begin their shopping by selecNng their size. Then they could browse through the styles available in their size. So should size be an Atribute, a Category,

or both? The answer depends upon what kind of shopping experience you want to create for your customers.

In Magento, you can give your shoppers the ability to search your store. So if the shoppers know that they want Blue Mountain coffee, they can use the Search funcNon to find it in our store. However, customers who don't know exactly what they want will browse the store. They will oGen begin browsing by selecNng a category. With the organizaNon that

we just saw, when customers browse our store, they will start by selecNng Single Origin or Blends. Then the shoppers will select the product they want: Hawaiian Kona, Blue Mountain, Breakfast Blend, or AGernoon Cruise.

AGer our shoppers decide upon a Product, they select Atributes for that product. In our store, shoppers can select Grind for any of the products. For Single Origin, they can also select Roast. For blends, they can select Caffeine. This gives you a clue about how Magento

handles atributes. To each Product, you can apply as many, or as few, atributes as you want.

Now that we have definiNons for Category, Product, and Atribute, let's look at each of them in detail. Then, we can start adding products.

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