Clothing store

Clothing brand sell product which are configurable. For example a t-shirt can be available in 2 colors and 5 sizes.

On the frontend

The customer wants the t-shirt to appear one time in his catalog/ product list. On the product details you can choose between available options (colors and sizes for instance). Checkout is done on a particular configuration

On the backend

Stocks (SKU and quantity) must be on the real product (a t-shirt with a particular color and size) Some other attributes are shared between the available options Promotions and analytics can either concern real or "virtual" product

The Magento way.

Magento handles this case with "Configurable product". A configurable product is a virtual product with a set of real (simple) products which share some attribute (color & size) with differents values.

This implementation works perfectly but it means that for our example (2 colors and 5 sizes) there is 11 differents products reference in the admin catalog. Each product must created/configured/updated independantly. => Nightmare for store owner to use this (what about uploading the same photos for each 5 sizes with the same color?). => Performance issue?

Thanks Lufi for your input!