Managing Configurable Products in Magento 2

Configurable products are built around customer choices of attributes, like size, color, or characteristics, and combine many simple product variants by allowing customers to select those attributes.  Aside from choices available to the customer, the other default attributes or custom attributes you create for your configurable product will behave just like they do for simple products.
Setting up a new configurable product is virtually the same as creating a simple product in the admin panel except that configurations need to be created after setting the normal product info.

 

Creating/Editing Configurations:

The first thing you will need to do to officially make a configurable product is to add configurations, which are actually just simple products. Thus your configurable product is essentially a collection of the simple product variations such as each specific size and color option. The best way to do that is by creating them in bulk with the Magento admin panel’s help via the import feature. However, you can create them manually in the configurable product or one by one in the admin panel by adding a new simple product.

 

Configurable Attributes

The first step in creating configurations is you must select attributes that will be configurable by the customer. Only certain attribute types can be configurable, such as drop down and multi-select. So you must create the attributes appropriately.

 
Step 1: Select Attributes
Select the unique attributes that each of your new simple product variants of the parent configurable product will have.
 
 

 
Step 2: Configure Attribute values
Select the attribute values the customers will be able to choose from. From your selection, this will create the needed simple product variants of the original product with unique SKU’s.
 
 

 
Step 3: Bulk Images, Price, & Quantity:
Apply bulk changes to only the new simple products that are being created.  This can be skipped by selecting the “Skip at this time” radio buttons, and can always be changed manually in the panel after.
 
 
 

 
Step 4: Summary
New Product Review:
The first table lists products you will create for your configurable product from the options you’ve selected from the previous pages.
Associated Products:
The second table lists products that already exist for the configurable product. Compare these tables to make sure you have all the configurations you need.
Disassociated Products:
The third table lists the products that will no longer be connected to the configurable product.
After you’re done with configurations, be sure to hit “save” in the top-right when you are on the main product page.
Now you have created your configurable product. For all other information associated with the configurable product, it will follow the same rules as simple product attributes do that you can learn about here.