Types enables you to organize your products into different class so that your customers can easily find them and/or for TAX purposes. Different countries has different TAX rates applied to different type of products like baby items, cars, consumable goods, oil, etc.

By default catalog type is installed, a catalog type is only used if you want to display catalog style or an article without a prices same like K2 items or Zoo items.

Importance of Type

Organizing your products with a correct types will make your life easier if your store start to have a thousand of products available and for TAX purposes. In addition it will makes it easy to find a product base on the Type if you want to update only specific product.

To understand this idea better, let’s follow with an example.

United Kingdom VAT Rates
Take note that the information below is not accurate and for example purposes only.
Standard Rate >> 20% (Most goods and services)
Reduced Rate >> 5% (Some goods and services, eg children’s car seats and home energy)
Zero Rate >> 0% (Zero-rated goods and services, eg most food and children’s clothes)

If you have items that falls to any of the above rates, creating types will enable you to assign the item to specific product types so you can assign different tax rates depending in which category they fall.

You may want to create a type for standard rate, reduced rate, zero rate products so when you create your items you can select where VAT category the product belongs. Below sample show the new product types, if you don't want to use the default Product Types, you can disable it.

Step 1 Creating a product type

From the Joomla admin panel, navigate to Components >> [any Joobi ecommerce] >> Catalog >> Types
From the Types page, click New to create a new type.

Step 2 Fill in all the required fields to create a type

Most of the options obtain a tooltip which are indicated by an asterisk (*). that will help you explain its usage.

Name: Enter the name of your product type.
Designation: The designation define what are the product options and management.
Identifier: Enter here the identifier for the item type.
Description: Enter here the description of the item type.
Image: Upload the image of the product type.
Who can view items: Define who can view the items of this type.
Who can edit items: Specify who can create/edit item of this type.
Order: Define the ordering of type in the Type listing.
Publish: Define to enable the type or not.

Step 3 Define your type attributes

Each type has its own attributes so you can fully manage the publishing and terms of your products base on Types.

Step 4 Assign a layout for your types

Each types has its own Layout to control the behavior of your store products base on Product types in your storefront.

Catalog per type menu

Each product type can be displate in your storefront similar to your Store Home Catalog.

To understand this idea better, let’s follow with an example.

Instead of create a category called "Clothing", we can create a Type of clothing to display it in the menu. Having said that, you can also achieve the same result using "Display one category" menu. See "add category" article.

From the Types listing, copy the type id of the type you want to display in the menu

Step 1 Create a Joomla menu

From the Joomla admin panel, navigate to Menus >> select the menu that you want to use for your Type

Step 2 Select "Catalog per type" as your menu item type

Step 3 Copy and Paste the type id that you've seen from Catalog >> Type