Adding products

The sample products

A fresh install comes with three sample products — a coffee mug, a book and a T-shirt with sizes and colours — so the storefront has something to show from the first minute. While they are in your catalogue, Solidshop → Products lists them above the product list with a button that moves them all to the trash. You can restore them from the trash (Filter Options → Select Status → Trashed), and emptying the trash deletes them for good. A sample product that has been ordered is left alone: it is part of your order history.

Create a category first

Every product belongs to a category. Go to Solidshop → Categories to create your first category (e.g. “T-Shirts”, “Electronics”, or just “General”). Categories can be nested to any depth.

Create a product

Navigate to Solidshop → Products → New. The product form has several sections:

Basic details

• Name — the product title shown to customers
• Alias — auto-generated from the name, used in the URL
• Category — select the category you created
• Product type — “Physical” for tangible goods (other types are available via add-on plugins — Downloadable is free; Service and Subscription are commercial). When creating a product you pick the type from a set of cards; on saved products it becomes a dropdown. Changing the type reloads the form so only the tabs relevant to that type are shown — for example, Downloadable products get a Downloads tab and no Shipping tab. Your unsaved edits are kept across the reload.
• Brand — optional, you can create new brands inline. Brands are managed under Catalog → Brands, where each one can carry a logo — that is what the Brands module prints in a “Shop by brand” band, and what the brand filter narrows the listing by.
• Summary — a short description shown in product listings
• Description — the full product description with rich text formatting
• Tags — free-form tags for filtering and search

Media

Drag and drop product images, videos, or 3D models straight onto the media area, or browse and upload them through the built-in media manager. Solidshop automatically generates thumbnails at four sizes (small 150px, medium 356px, large 800px, and extra-large 2000px). You can configure these sizes and the aspect ratio (square, portrait, landscape, or original) under Options → Media. The ratio applies to every generated size, from the thumbnail tiles up to the full-size image on the product page, and images are cropped to it as they are uploaded.

Changing a size or the ratio later does not touch the images already in the library, so the storefront would ask for files that were never written. Open the media manager instead: a notice counts the images still at the old sizes, and Regenerate images rebuilds them a batch at a time while the tab stays open. Images already at the current sizes are skipped, so a run that was interrupted picks up where it stopped when you start it again. The files at the old sizes stay on disk unless you tick the option to delete them, and that step asks for a second confirmation because it cannot be undone.

A large library is quicker to rebuild from the command line, where there is no execution limit and nothing to keep open:

php cli/joomla.php solidshop:media:regenerate

--dry-run reports what would be written without touching a file, --force rewrites images that are already at the current sizes, --prune deletes the files at sizes no longer configured, and --store=<id> picks a store other than the master store.

Pricing

• Price — the selling price
• Original price — optional “was” price shown as a strikethrough
• Cost per item — what one unit costs you to buy or make, kept for your own records and never shown to customers
• Tax class — which tax class applies to this product, or use the store default

Inventory

• SKU — stock-keeping unit for your internal tracking
• Barcode — optional UPC/EAN
• Track quantity — enable to manage stock levels; Solidshop will prevent overselling. Defaults to on for Physical products and off for types without physical stock (Downloadable, Service, Subscription, Virtual) — you can still enable it on any type, e.g. a service with limited seats
• Quantity — current stock count (only shown when tracking is enabled)

Shipping

This tab only appears for product types that ship (Physical).

• Weight — product weight in your store’s configured unit (kg or g), used for shipping rate calculations

SEO

• Meta description — the search engine snippet (max 160 characters)
• Page title — custom browser title (max 70 characters), with a live preview of how the result appears in a search engine listing

Publishing

• Status — Published, Unpublished, Archived, or Trashed
• Publish up / down — schedule when the product becomes visible

Options & variants

If your product comes in multiple versions (sizes, colours, materials), use the Options section of the product form.

1. Add an option (e.g. “Size”) and define its values (e.g. S, M, L, XL).
2. Add more options if needed (e.g. “Colour” with values Red, Blue, Black).
3. Tick Generate variants and save — Solidshop creates all combinations automatically (e.g. “S / Red”, “S / Blue”, “M / Red”, etc.).
4. Each variant can override the parent product’s price, SKU, barcode, weight, and stock quantity.