Choosing the right product type shapes everything downstream: how customers configure, how stock decrements, how pricing displays, how orders fulfil. Magento’s six types cover most retail models, but misusing them - a grouped product that should be a bundle, a configurable with 4,000 children - creates problems that surface months later. Here is the field guide.
Simple
The atom. One SKU, one price, one stock record. Everything else is built from simples. Even when a simple product is never sold alone (a size variant of a shoe), it exists as a simple with visibility “Not Visible Individually”.
Configurable
One parent product whose customers pick options - size, colour - and receive a chosen simple child. The configurable has no stock of its own; salability derives from children.
- Use for: products that are the same item in variants
- Watch out for: variant explosion. 5 colours x 8 sizes is 40 children - fine. Multi-attribute matrices in the thousands make the product page’s JSON config huge and indexing painful. Past a few hundred children, consider splitting into several configurables
- Frontend note: the swatch/configurable JS is heavy; keep attribute count low and images optimised
Bundle
A product assembled by the customer from component choices: a PC with selectable RAM, a gift box with chosen contents. Each choice maps to simple products with their own stock.
- Ship together or separately is a bundle-level setting with fulfilment consequences
- Pricing: fixed or dynamic (sum of selections) - dynamic suits pick-your-kit, fixed suits curated sets
- Use for: build-your-own, kits, hampers
Grouped
A page presenting several independent simples with quantity boxes - “buy the look”, related equipment sets. Unlike a bundle, each item is just added to cart; no configuration relationship, no bundle pricing.
- Use for: merchandising collections where items stand alone
- Common mistake: using grouped for variants. Sizes of a shirt are a configurable, not a grouped product
Virtual and Downloadable
Virtual: no shipping (services, warranties, bookings). Downloadable: virtual plus files with per-order links, download limits and expiries. Both skip the shipping step in checkout, which simplifies the flow but breaks assumptions in some shipping and tax customisations - test them explicitly.
Type Changes and Data Hygiene
Magento does not convert between types in the admin - a simple becoming a configurable means creating new products and migrating orders’ historical references carefully (order items store type and SKU, so history is safe, but URLs and wishlists need attention). Decide types during catalog modelling, before the first import.
Model the catalog the way the warehouse thinks (simples) and present it the way customers think (configurables, bundles). When those two views are clean, everything else - feeds, stock syncs, reporting - falls into place.