Managing Specification Attributes

With specification attributes, you can provide more detailed information about your products and help buyers compare them more easily. You can also refine your catalog content while browsing & searching. Working with specification attributes provides the following benefits:

• Specification attributes are displayed as tabular data in a product's detail page as a sort of data sheet, showing your product's individual features and properties in more detail.
• When buyers compare products in your store, the comparison grid displays not only pictures, names and prices, but also an intersection of all specification attributes assigned to the products being compared.
• Each attribute can be included in the Filter Sidebar Widget, which is displayed on all category overview pages. This widget enables your buyers to find products by their features instead of browsing through the statically organized category tree. For more information about the Sidebar Filter Widget ,read the topic Understanding the Filter Sidebar Widget.

Usage scenario

Imagine you're running a shop with all kinds of printers. In this case, your buyers will most likely expect to be informed about the following printer specifications:

• Printer Technology: Inkjet, Laser
• Connectivity: Wireless, Memory Card, USB
• Output: B/W, Color
• Double-Sided Printing: Yes, No
• Resolution: 600 dpi, 1200 dpi, ...
• Supported Media Sizes: A3, A4, A5, B5, Envelope, ...

You could, of course, capture the above info in the product's long description as an HTML table, but you would lose the ability to include those features in the filter widget or in product comparisons. Also, if you wanted to change the name or value of an attribute globally, you would still have to update all product records manually, which is a tedious and cumbersome task. It's much better to add this sort of data as global specification attributes to your store and assign them to your products later.

Adding Specification Attributes

You can add new specification attributes by going to Catalog > Specification Attributes. The attributes you add here are globally available in your store and can be assigned to any product in the product detail configuration in the specification attributes tab. When creating specification attributes, you can specify Display Names for every language configured in your store, as well as a display order that specifies the order of attributes in the frontend. Once you've created a specification attribute, you can add the options to be made available when configuring the specification of a product. To do so, go to the Options-Tab of the attribute and click on Add a New Option. Here, you can also specify localized Display Names and a Display Order.

Assigning Specification Attributes to Products

After you have set up your specification attributes, you're ready to assign them to your products. Assignment takes place in the Specification Attributes tab of the Edit Product Details screen.

Fields Reference