Configurable Product

A Configurable product in Magento offers the customers a variety of options, which are selected from drop-down lists. For example, a t-shirt that comes in three colors and three sizes would have two lists of options for Color and Size.

Configurable Products let your customers select the variant they desire by choosing options. For example, you sell t-shirts in two colors and three sizes. You’d create the six variants as individual products (with their own skus) and then add these six to a configurable product from where customers can choose size and color, then add to cart. If desired you could also have customers search for “red medium t-shirt” and land on the specific page for this variant.

Complex products in Magento are a way to consolidate product variants onto a single product info page in the front-end. The variants themselves are actually simple products and have their own SKUs and stock management. This is very powerful - it allows you to let customers search for the individual variants, but browse only to the consolidated product pages. Here are some selected options of Magento catalog management: