What’s the main difference between picking a product online and in a brick-and-mortar store?
This, of course, is the lack of physical contact.
The main specifity of online shopping is that you can’t touch or examine products in your hands. Therefore, selling products online you need to make every effort to supply customers with most detailed information on the goods you offer.
Along with that, it's highly possible that the basic component of your online store catalog is a simple product. Making it a part of configurable, bundle, or virtual products, you also need to show the details of the associated simple items.
One of the main assistants, in this case, is a native Magento 2 Color Swatches feature. The Color Swatches is a working solution for configurable products that consist of numerous simple products. To show your customers the variety of colors, sizes, designs of a configurable product you need to:
(1) create the desired swatches,
(2) update your product and
(3) save the changes.
We have taken further steps and boosted the built-in Magento 2 functionality. And today our Color Swatches Pro helps many store owners present their goods multifeatured to bring customers even closer to a real-life shopping experience.
What more can you do with the use of the module?
(1) display prices of simple products together with relevant swatches;
(2) create and share URLs to specific product configurations;
(3) reload information of selected simple items to speed up the shopping process and others.
For more information, read here.
However, we are continuously seeking the improvement of our extensions functionality and Magento 2 Color Swatches Pro makes no exception. This time we want to show you 4 NEW features added to the module.
Magento 2 Color Swatches Pro 4 new features
#1 NEW: Compatibility with the video image type
Now the extension supports video image types that are available in the lightbox.
To add a video to a product, navigate to Products>Catalog to choose a needed product. Then switch to the Images And Videos setting and click the Add Video button:
Configure the New Video and save the settings:
#2 NEW: Out-of-stock products as crossed swatches
You know that after Magento 2.2.0 version the functionality with crossed swatches was removed.
We’ve thought of that and supplied the module with a new Show Out of Stock Configurable Attributes setting to make your product presentation up-to-date. Once the feature is enabled, a currently unavailable simple product (that is a part of a configurable one) will be displayed as a crossed swatch.
To find the configuration, navigate to Stores>Configuration>Color Swatches Pro>Show Out of Stock Configurable Attributes and set it to Yes:
Following is how an out-of-stock product swatch is displayed on the frontend:
#3 NEW: Image flipper feature
We added a new image flipper feature that allows users to view the alternate image of a configurable product right on the catalog pages simply by placing mouse hover.
To find the feature setting, navigate to Stores>Configuration>Color Swatches Pro>Enable Product Image Flipper:
Choose Yes to enable the feature on the category and catalog search lists.
Note that to activate the feature, you need to specify Flipper Image for each product:
To find more information on this, read the user guide.
Here is how the feature looks like on the frontend:
#4 NEW: Preselect for configurable products
The new Preselect feature allows you to choose the options displayed for configurable products.
You can choose between two options here:
(1) The First Option: the module will display the first simple item of a configurable product;
(2) The Cheapest One: the module will display the cheapest simple item of a configurable product.
Each of the functions applies after a customer navigates to the product page.
To set the option, go to Stores>Configuration>Color Swatches Pro>Preselect for All Configurable Products and click the drop-down menu to choose the desired option:
Here is how the Cheapest Product feature works on the frontend:
To sum it up
Now the upgraded Magento 2 Color Swatches Pro provides you with more opportunities to enhance the customers' shopping experience.
We highly appreciate your feedback and are looking forward to hearing about your experience with the extension.