Design your model
Design the catalog structure once, properly: attributes, families, variants, categories, reference entities, assets and units.
This is the part that pays back. An hour spent on the model saves weeks of per-product cleanup later, because in a catalog of any size the structure does the work that people otherwise do by hand.
Work through these roughly in order. Each builds on the one before.
- Plan your data model — the decisions to make before you create anything.
- Attributes and attribute groups — the fields a product can have.
- Families — which fields a given kind of product must have.
- Variants and family variants — one article, many sizes.
- Categories — the tree buyers browse.
- Reference entities — manufacturers and materials as records.
- Assets and asset families — managed media.
- Measurements and units — numbers that know what they mean.