Product Overview

Products are the essential components of an order, and at least one product must exist to create a checkout or order. The table below outlines the business logic that products contain out of the box, but note this functionality can be opt-in or customized.

Logic	Description	Required/Optional/Customizable
Availability	Products are enabled per channel.	Required.
Taxes	Products can be assigned to specific tax classes with sales tax rules defined at the country and channel levels.	Optional and customizable. Taxes on order lines can be set by external services.
Product information	Product types define attributes (fields) that product data will hold.	Optional. Product information can reside in external sources.
Catalog	The product can be linked to categories, collections, and other products or content blocks.	Optional. It can be managed externally but can help define promotions or price discounts in Saleor.
Variants	Variations of a product, such as color, size, material, or any user-defined dimension, are mapped to a Stock Keeping Unit or a unique slug.	Optional. A product can have one or many variants;
Metadata	Storing arbitrary data about products, typically useful for transactional.	Optional.

Product and variants

Variants are designed to provide variations of the product, such as size, material, color, or any other dimension that can be user-defined; if the product has no variants, you will need to create a product with a single variant because prices and stock can only be assigned at a variant level.

It might seem like it is overhead to configure twice the availability of variant and product (especially when there is only one variant), but it has an intentional purpose. First, it gives more degree of freedom per variant, and second, it is convenient when you have many variants and need to disable one all at once in a single channel.

It is possible to create products without variants, but checkout and orders can only contain variants.

Level of control	Description	Required/Optional/Customizable
Price	The price is set at the channel level, which can have a dedicated currency. Prices can be set as Selling Prices intended for customers and Cost Prices, which are optional and only used for internal purposes.	Customizable. It can be overwritten on the checkout/order level.
Availability	Variants inherit the product’s availability and allow a finer level of control. For example, if the product is available in 2 out of 3 channels, then variant availability will be available in respective 2 channels.	Required.
Stock tracking	Automatic tracking decrements stock after purchase.
Attributes	Product types can define variant-specific attributes
Warehouse assignment	Variants are mapped to unique SKUs that can belong to multiple warehouses.
Media	Images are inherited from the product; for example, if the product has images A, B, and C, any product image can be assigned to a specific asset. This way, the product summarizes all product images and variant points to a specific image relevant to the variant	Optional.
Metadata	Storing arbitrary data about products, typically useful for transactional	Optional

Product types

Product type is a collection of attributes with different types of fields. For example a Product Type T-shirt will have Size, Material and Length attributes.

Material: can be Cotton or Polyester and represents a dropdown attribute assigned to a product type.

Size: of the shirt is a product option that can be selected by the customer; it comes with predefined sizes so that it will be of type Dropdown and Variant selection attribute.

Length: is an attribute specific to a variant. It is not something that customers can select, and it is unique to each product so that it will be of type Numeric.

Categories and Collections

Products in Saleor can be organized using two main catalog structures: Categories and Collections. Each serves a distinct purpose in merchandising and storefront navigation.

Structure	Description	Product Association	Use Cases
Categories	Hierarchical taxonomy for organizing products in parent-child relationships (e.g., Electronics → Phones → Smartphones).	Each product belongs to one category.	Main navigation, filtered search.
Collections	Flexible, flat groups for curating products outside the category tree (e.g.,“Summer Sale”, “New Arrivals”).	Products can belong to multiple collections.	Promotions, campaigns, merchandising, A/B tests.

Read more about Categories and Collection configuration.