Magento 2: configurable product price calculation. What’s changed?

The advent of Magento 2 is associated with notable changes, starting from software architecture to completely redesigned backend. Whether you have just started deploying Magento 2.x versions or just explore its functionality from the day renewed versions appeared, you may come across different, compared to Magento 1.x, logics.

One of these multiple shifts refers to Magento 2 configurable products price settings. Comparing to Magento 1.x, its successor boasts of new approach to configurable product price handling. In this tutorial, we’ll cover this difference and explain how to price configurables in Magento 2.

Configurable Product Price Calculation in Magento 1.x

When you create configurable product in Magento 1.x, it does not matter what price you specify for associated simple products, since their prices are completely ignored. Instead, you need to set price mark-ups for configurable attribute values (super attribute) if some selection should cost more and some should be cheaper.

Whatever price value you add for simple associated products, configurable product price will override associated product price. If super attribute values have mark-ups, they will be added to configurable product price.

How to Set Price for Configurables in Magento 2.x

The notion of Magento super attribute price became a thing of the past. Magento 2 does not calculate price mark-ups on the basis of super attributes (Magento configurable attributes). Now configurable product price is absolutely ignored, only associated items cost is taken into account.

When creating associated simple products via admin generator, you can set different prices for them by one of the attribute. When you select this attribute, there will appear price boxes for each of attribute value you selected on previous step. As you can see at the screenshot below, we have chosen color to differentiate prices and input cost for each of values.

After generation completes, you can view the prices of associated products.

By default, the lowest price if shown at the storefront. For example, the lowest price in our case is set for the blue belts ($11). When visitors open product page, they see $11 as the product price. Though Magento 2 configurable product price will change, depending on combination of attribute values, customer selects.

Magento also offers you to set identical price for all selections. If you assign already existing simple products, they most likely have the prices specified.

If you need to massively set absolutely different prices for Magento products variations, consider Store Manager for Magento. It allows to edit associated simple product price within generator or via import.

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