How to Configure Text, Image and Color Swatches in Magento 2

Swatches are a great way to add more competitive advantages to your configurable products. Rather than selecting from the drop-down list, shoppers can choose what they like by clicking a swatch. Such configurable swatches can be used on the product and category pages and in layered navigation.

Text, color or image swatch have proved to be effective tools in making product offerings appealing and informative.

Color Swatch

This functionality enables you to display available color/texture/patterns options. When an item is displayed in different colors, it is easier for a shopper to pick up the right product variation.

Text Swatch

This functionality is generally used for displaying sizes or any other type of text-based options. This kind of swatch is a button with a text label and works absolutely the same way as the color swatch.

Image Swatch

The image swatch functionality allows you to enhance visual components of your product offerings and give customers the ability to see product variations in different colors/textures.

How to Configure Swatches in Magento 2

Go to Stores - Attributes - Product and click on the Color Attribute option.

From here, you can configure all the available color swatch settings:

• Catalog Input Type for Store Owner — allows you to define the input type. You can select from the Dropdown Menu, Visual Swatch and Text Swatch.
• Update Product Preview Image — updates the product image on the catalog page when filtered by this attribute.
• Use Product Image for Swatch if Possible — allows replacing a swatch image with a product swatch or a base image.

When done, move to the Manage Swatch (Values of Your Attribute) section.

Click on the Add Swatch button to set the values for the selected attribute. If you’ve chosen a color swatch, then you can add the colors you need and fill in the text descriptions. Also, you can replace colors with images. Hit the arrow near the color box and hit the Upload a file button.

Please note, for a text swatch you can define values only as text. The easiest variant is to use a dropdown type with the text description values.

How to Assign Attributes to the Products

When all the configuration steps are done, you need to assign attributes to the products. Go to Products - Catalog, select a product you want to attach an attribute to and hit the Update Attributes option from the Actions drop-down. In the 'Color tab' change the attribute for the necessary one.

How to Configure Product Options in Magento 2 Using Third-Party Extensions

If your Magento 2 store contains a lot of products with custom options, manual configuration may become a time-consuming thing. The main reason being - each single product option must be configured manually.

Advanced Product Options extension can help you solve this issues and save lots of time.

The module allows you to create custom options templates and apply them to any number of products at once.

Go to Stores - Mageworx Option Templates option. From here, you can create a new template with custom options or edit the existing ones. The templates option greatly eases the pain of manual configuration.

To control the inventory of custom options, go to Stores - Option Inventory Report.This functionality gives you the ability to modify any number of custom options in a few clicks.

As you can see, this extension can save you much time and ease the process of adding custom options to products.