Magento’s configurable products is an obvious choice to organize your products with multiple variations.
Configurable products are shown as a collection of simple products. It is placed in a drop-down list, allowing the customers to choose from different variations. Each variation is a separate simple product with a unique SKU and an inventory listing.
Examples of configurable products are shoes (sizes), apparel (colors, sizes), jewelry (material, gems), and many others.
It may take a time to setup the configurable products in Magento. It gets even more complex if you want to sync it with your QuickBooks accounting system. However, it can save you time in a long run.
How does linksync integrate configurable products in Magento and QuickBooks Online?
In this video, we will demonstrate to you how to create configurable products in Magento; and how it is synced with QuickBooks Online with the use of linksync.
The linksync for Magento and QuickBooks Online integration helps sync products, inventory, price and orders between your Magento online store and your QuickBooks Online accounting system. It is a Magento extension built to instantly sync data between these two applications with the help of your unique SKU.
You can use either of the following options to sync your data:
- Two-way:– In the two-way sync, your product data is synced between both Magento and QuickBooks Online, thus enabling the changes made to the products and the inventory in either of the two systems to be synced to the other within a few moments.
- QuickBooks to Magento:- In this option, QuickBooks Online is the ‘master’ when it comes to managing product and inventory, and product updates are one-way, i.e., from QuickBooks Online to Magento. The product and inventory data do not update back to QuickBooks Online from Magento.
If you are selling products with multiple variations, you can create configurable products in Magento by adding attributes, attribute sets, and their associated simple products.
Click here to get a step-by-step guide on how to create configurable products in Magento.
Syncing your configurable products to QuickBooks is slightly complicated due to the inability of QuickBooks to recognize configurable products. It only recognizes the simple products.
Because Magento and QuickBooks Online have different ways of dealing with products in multiple variations, we need to establish a common denominator between the two applications — the variants or the simple products.
In the example shown, we created the following configurable products in Magento:
Parent product: T-shirt
Attributes: Small and Medium
Variants: T-shirt Small and T-shirt Medium
Only the variants T-shirt Small and T-shirt Medium are synced in QuickBooks Online
Note that in Magento, the parent product is set as a configurable product and the variants are set as simple products.
The parent product (e.g. T-shirt) will not be synced to QuickBooks, because, technically, it cannot be sold in the front end. It is only used as a placeholder to host the variants in Magento and it does not have the price and inventory.
Click here to learn more about linksync for Magento and QuickBooks Online. You can also watch this video on how to set up the linksync integration.