Best Practices for Planning Attributes and Attribute Sets

Question

We have a tool shop and anticipate having around 40K simple products. With that we anticipate having around 2500 attribute sets, and as many as 10,000 attributes. I'm concerned about system performance, searching and page load speed. Would it be better to try to reuse as many attributes as possible?

For example Size, Color, Type, Material are attributes used frequently. These are filterable attributes too, so we will have to set them up as dropdown attributes.

Question: Is it better to try to reuse these attributes among many different attribute sets? Or would that be harder for the store owner when he's maintaining all these products.

Please advise and let me know what the best practices are.

Thx!

Answer 1

Obviously reuse attributes between attribute sets where it makes sense.

The key with attributes is to strike a balance between the number of attributes and attribute options. Its no good having a single colour attribute if you have 3000 options for it. Similarly, its a waste if you have 300 attributes for colour, with only 10 options in each.

The thing with attributes, is whilst desirable to have rich, detailed information for products, it isn't always necessary to break down every possible facet of a product into attributes.

Attributes need only be populated if they are being used, for example if they are used for layered nav., for configurable product creation etc. But if merely just to display product information, there is no reason why you couldn't group the data in a single attribute text field.

Attribute sets usually mirror categories - and there is no good reason to have 2500 categories of products. That being said, attribute sets don't really come with overhead, only the attributes do.