Drupal Commerce - add fields to product or product display?

Question

Ive used Ubercart before but im making my first site with Commerce. Im wondering if I should add fields (eg image and description) to my product or product displays?

Im making a site where most of my product displays will relate to one product only.

In some cases however you will have a choice of different weights to purchase. I dont yet know if Ill do this with multiple products and one product display, or if another method would be simpler.

In the future I may want to make multipacks, so combine 10 products into a single purchase and then either give a discount on this pack, or a discount on the total price (which would allow users to substitute the chosen products so long as the total price is the same). Thanks

Answer 1

I've been through the same hesitations, and although my site will not have initially any selling activity (I'm using Commerce just as a framework for presenting products, Cart disabled) I decided to build the whole product catalog on the Commerce foundation. Thus, if the decision to open the store comes up some day, it will be relatively easy to open. No revolution or migration would probably be involved.

Thus, before I even get to see the cart, I had to answer lots of abstract question to myself upfront. Basically I worked out two rules of thumb which seemed to guide me through doubts:

1. Adding fields to product or product display? - go the Product way when the field describes a property that could be common for all product displays for that product. Of course, by having fields on product displays you have the power to make the product displays different, but you face the risk of multiplicating need for change, when something needs to be altered.
2. As per what should make a separate product, and what just an attribute - think of a Product as of SKU or a barcode - a unique stock identifier. This has to be unique, this will be bounding all Product displays and orders to a Product. Whatever has to be distinguished, discerned in stock reports or invoices, should be a separate product. So, basically, would you be fine with SKU like TSHIRT, or would you prefer TSHIRT-MENS, or would you need TSHIRT-MENS-XL, or perhaps TSHIRT-MENS-XL-BLUE... It all depends on the particular store and bookkeeping. But the more detailed you go on the Product level, the more data and images you will have to enter into store.

I don't have a case of multipacks and such, but I imagine that you would definitely need a separate product for that, to be able to have a special bundle price for it, and - as I mentioned: - you'd probably want to see on the report: TSHIRT-MENS-5-PK to see whether you do a better business when selling bundles or multipacks.

Well, that's my opinion and I'd be happy to listen to other people's insights. Maybe my philosophy is wrong...

Answer 2

I add all fields that will never change depending on the variations to the product display. For the fields that will change based on variation, those fields go on the product itself.

Example:

A tee-shirt from "Rockstar Threads," a brand, and a tee-shirt from "Basic Clothes," another brand. Each shirt has two colors each, red and black.

The red Rockstar shirt is the same brand as the black Rockstar shirt. The red Basic shirt is the same brand as the black Basic shirt.

So the "brand" field gets attached to the product display. The "color" field gets attached to the product. Now, when I create a new product, for each variation I can add a color, but I only choose a brand once since it's attached to the display. All in all, anything that will remain constant across all variations is attached to the display. Anything that will change, attach to the product.

Answer 3

to my understanding the product display is just that - a presentation of the product. The presentation may be the same for several variations of the product like sizes of a T-shirt design. I would suggest you go with the pictures on the product presentations - not the product themselves. to me it sounds like this is one product display and many products or product variations.