Product types are groups of products which share the same attributes. The most popular examples of product types and attributes are "Books" with "ISBN, Pages, Author, Cover, ect."; "Apparel" with "Brand, Season, Material"; "Hand-made", etc. If you sell products which could be grouped in one or more types, the product types feature may well be very useful for you.

You can easily create new product type and add any attributes on Catalog > Product types page.

You can change product attributes visibility using "Show" option opposite each of them.

You will find "Attributes" tab on the product modify page. All products are assigned to the "General" product type by default and have two ("UPC" and "Brand") pre-set attributes there. You can use these attributes together with attributes of your own product type. When custom product type is selected, its attributes will be added to the default attributes.

With help of product types you will gain the following advantages for your store:

- Creation product characteristics that display on the product detailed page

- Storage of service information about product that isn't supposed to be visible to your customers

For your convenience we added a default product type that is assigned to all products - "General". This type is created with two attributes that we consider the most commonly used, they can be applied to different product types:

- "UPC": unique product identifier such as UPC (in North America), EAN (in Europe), JAN (in Japan) and ISBN (for books).

- "Brand": brand or manufacturer of the product. It can be used as "Author" attribute for books, as "Producer" for electronics, and as "Brand" for apparels.

These attributes are always available in the control panel and can't be deleted. They can also be exported and imported via CSV import tool. If you don't want to use them, you can hide them from your customers. Also you can create your own product types with these attributes.

We recommend you to use product types, if you sell products which can be combined in one or more groups with a set of attributes. The most frequently used product types and attributes are:

1. Book: ISBN, Author, Illustrator, Pages, Cover, Year, etc.

2. Apparel: Brand, Season, Fabric, etc.

3. Electronics: Manufacturer, Size, etc.