Adding a Grouped product starts in Catalog | Manage Products. Click on the Add to Cart button and in the next screen, choose Grouped Product and click on Continue:
The product edit screen that is now displayed should look familiar, with the exception of three things:
- It is not possible to enter a price for the Grouped product as the purchase price is determined by the underlying products that the customer chooses to add to his/her cart
- It is not possible to enter a stock quantity for the Grouped product as the stock information is kept in the underlying products
- There is the Associated Products tab, where the products that should be displayed in the "add to cart" form in the storefront for this Grouped product should be set
We will name our product "Phone and/or House Cleaning". The products that will be displayed in the "add to cart" form for this Grouped product will be a phone and the House Cleaning Virtual product that we created earlier.
After filling in the regular product information and setting the Stock Availability field to In Stock in the Inventory tab, open the Associated Products tab (located at the bottom of the left column). The Associated Products tab will show a product grid containing all Virtual and Simple products in your store. This has two implications:
- You can only associate Virtual and Simple products to a Grouped product
- If you do not have Virtual or Simple products in your store, you cannot display any choices in the Grouped product's add to cart form
The grid that is displayed in the Associated Products tab functions much as other Magento admin grids. It has pagination above the table, and the table has several fields:
- A column with checkboxes
- ID
- Name
- SKU
- Price
- Default Qty
- Position
In the header above the column with checkboxes, you see a drop-down menu, which is set to Any when you are adding the Grouped product. The next time you open your Grouped product (after saving), this drop-down menu will be set to Yes. The grid will then only show Simple and Virtual products that are already associated to the Grouped product. In that case, set this drop-down menu to Any or No, and press the Search button in the top-right corner to display all or all non-associated products inside the grid.
The ID, Name, and SKU fields display the corresponding Simple and/or Virtual product information. The Default Qty field allows you to set a default order quantity for each associated product. By default Magento displays a zero in the add to cart form, if you want some products selected for purchase by default in your Grouped product, you can fill in a one or higher. In the Position column, you can enter a non-negative whole number value to indicate the position of the product inside the add to cart form on the product page.
The ID, Name, SKU, Default Qty, and Position columns are searchable. You can enter a value in each column's header cell and press the Search button to look for specific products according to the values you entered.
The product grid in our case displays a heap of Simple products from Magento's sample data as well as the "House Cleaning" product from our discussion of the Virtual product. Associating a Simple or Virtual product with our Grouped product can be done by selecting the checkboxes for the products we want to associate. In our example, we have done so for the "House Cleaning" and "HTC touch Diamond" products.
After saving, you can view the product page on the frontend. It should look similar to our example. Fill in a quantity of one, and click on the Add to Cart button. The cart will look exactly the same as it would if we had added these products to the cart separately from their respective product pages:
The final screen would be shown as follows:
