Creating Attribute Sets in Magento: A Complete Guide

Preparing Magento for Your Product Data

When adding new products to your Magento store, the first step is ensuring Magento is ready to receive your product data. Product information flows into various attributes, but these attributes won't apply to every product — a shirt requires different attributes than a laptop. This is where attribute sets become essential.

This guide walks you through creating attributes and organising them into logical sets for efficient product management.

Creating New Attributes

To access Magento's attribute management, navigate to Stores > Attributes > Product. This screen displays all existing attributes and provides options to create custom ones.

To add a new attribute, click Add New Attribute and complete the following fields:

🏷️ Label

Name the attribute in this field. The label should clearly describe the product characteristic it represents.

📋 Catalog Input Type for Store Owner

Attributes in Magento support several input types, each suited to different data requirements:

📝 Text Field — Single lines of text, ideal for SKUs or short product codes

📄 Text Area — Multiple lines of text for longer content such as detailed product descriptions

✏️ Text Editor — Like Text Area but with advanced formatting options including text styling and media/link insertion

📅 Date / Date & Time — Stores date and/or time values, useful for product release dates or expiry information

✅ Yes/No — Boolean attribute type for true/false values

☑️ Multiple Select — For attributes where multiple values apply. Example: a phone case compatible with several device models

🔽 Dropdown — Select a single option from a predefined list. Useful for brand names or single-choice categories

💰 Price — For attributes such as cost, sale price, and RRP

🖼️ Media Image — Additional images for purposes such as logos, instructions, or guidelines

🎨 Visual Swatch — Colour, pattern, or image swatches for configurable products. Can display hex values or images to help customers select variants

🔤 Text Swatch — Text-based selection for configurable products, such as shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL)

💷 Fixed Product Tax — For setting FPT rates based on selling location

⚙️ Manage Options

This field is used for entering the selectable options for Dropdown and Multiple Select attribute types.

⚠️ Required Value Setting

You can specify whether this attribute requires a value, making it essential to populate when creating certain products.

Once you've created your attributes, they'll appear in the attribute table ready for organisation.

📂 Sorting Attributes into Sets

With your attributes created, the next step is organising them into sets for specific product types. This separation is important for two reasons:

1️⃣ Different products need different attributes

2️⃣ If any attributes are marked as required, products cannot be created without them — making logical separation essential

To create an attribute set, navigate to Stores > Attributes > Attribute Sets.

This page displays all existing sets available for editing. Most stores start with the "Default" set. We recommend editing this set to include all attributes that apply universally across every product.

🏗️ Structuring Your Default Attribute Set

Your default set should contain attributes common to all products. Structure it to serve as a solid foundation that other sets can build upon.

➕ Creating a New Attribute Set

To create a new set:

1. Click Add Attribute Set
2. Enter a name for the set (e.g., "TShirts" for clothing products)
3. Base the new set on your default attribute set to inherit universal attributes
4. Save the initial set

🔄 Adding Attributes to Your Set

With your set created, drag the relevant attributes into the set. For a T-shirt attribute set, you'd include clothing-specific attributes such as size, colour, material, and fit.

✅ Using Your Attribute Set

Once saved, the new set becomes available when adding products. Select "TShirts" as the attribute set when creating T-shirt products, and you'll see only the relevant attributes — no wading through irrelevant fields.

💡 Why This Matters for Product Management

Well-organised attribute sets make product data entry faster and more accurate. Each product type has exactly the fields it needs, nothing more.

For businesses managing large catalogues, consider how a PIM system can streamline this further — managing attributes centrally and pushing organised data to Magento automatically, rather than configuring everything within Magento's admin interface.