Product Families

A product family is a top-level grouping for products that share the same set of characteristics. Every product in Beelocity belongs to exactly one family — it is a required relationship that determines the product’s data structure.

What Families Do

Families serve two important purposes:

1. Organization

Families group related products together. “Apparel”, “Electronics”, “Building Materials”, “Office Supplies” — each is a family that represents a broad product category in your business.

2. Attribute Definition

A family defines which attributes its products have. All products in the “Apparel” family share the same set of attributes (Size, Color, Material, Care Instructions, etc.). This ensures consistency across your catalog — you define the attributes once on the family, and every product in it automatically has fields for all of them.

For configurable products, the family’s variant attributes (like Size and Color) drive automatic variant generation. When you create a configurable product in a family that has variant attributes, Beelocity generates one variant for every combination of those attributes. See Product Attributes for details.

Creating a Family

1. Go to Products > Product Families (accessible from the Products page).
2. Click Create Family.
3. Fill in:
   • Name — a descriptive name for the family (e.g., “Textile Products”, “Electronic Components”).
   • Description — an optional explanation of what this family covers and what kinds of products belong to it.
   • Parent family — optionally, select an existing family as the parent to create a hierarchy.
4. Save.

After creating the family, you will want to define its attributes — this is what gives the family its value. Without attributes, a family is just a label.

Managing Attributes on a Family

From the family list, click Manage Attributes on any family to open the attribute management panel. Here you can:

• Add attributes — define new characteristics for products in this family.
• Edit attributes — change an attribute’s name, type, or options.
• Mark variant attributes — designate which attributes should drive variant generation for configurable products.
• Set required attributes — mark which attributes must be filled in when creating a product.

See Product Attributes for detailed information about attribute types, variant attributes, and how to configure them.

Family Hierarchy

Families can be organized into a parent-child tree. This is purely for organizational clarity — child families do not inherit attributes from their parent. Each family defines its own attributes independently.

Example

Apparel
├── T-Shirts
├── Pants
├── Jackets
└── Accessories

Electronics
├── Phones
├── Tablets
├── Accessories
└── Components

Building Materials
├── Cement & Concrete
├── Steel & Metal
└── Wood & Timber

The hierarchy helps you navigate a large family list. When you have 20 or 30 families, grouping them under parents keeps the list manageable.

Tips

• One family per product type — all products in a family share the same attributes, so group products that genuinely have the same characteristics. T-shirts and pants both need Size and Color, but a phone needs Screen Size and Storage — those should be different families.
• Define attributes before creating products — set up the family’s attributes first, then create products in that family. Adding attributes to a family that already has products is possible, but it means existing products will have empty values for the new attributes that you will need to fill in.
• Keep family names broad — “Clothing” is a better family name than “Red T-Shirts in Cotton”. Families are meant to represent broad product categories. Use product categories for finer classification.
• Use the hierarchy for navigation, not structure — since child families do not inherit from parents, the hierarchy is purely visual. Use it to keep your family list organized, not to model complex data relationships.