Product Automatically Converting To Virtual Product Instead of Simple Product in Magento

If you are experiencing a queer problem where by your products are automatically converting to virtual product instead of the default simple product then one of the reason might be —while creating the product, under the weight field you might be selecting the option - 'This item has no weight.' & when you do this Magento saves the products as virtual product. To save a product as simple product you must select the option as 'This item has weight.'

In case you have lots of product that are virtual and you would like to convert them to simple products, you can run this simple SQL query as below:

 UPDATE catalog_product_entity SET type_id = 'simple' WHERE type_id = 'virtual'  

product-automatically-converting-simple-product-virtual-product

Marketplace or Multi Store/Multi Website Solution in Magento 2 - Know which to use

Just like I had been all this while, you too must be confused between Marketplace or Multi Vendor/Multi Website solution, and unable to make your choice. In this post I will explain to you as to whether you should go for a Marketplace or Multi Store/Multi Website solution. There can be many reasons, but the ones below, were the ones that made me eventually go for a marketplace, in spite of successfully building a Multi Vendor Solution.

1. Marketplace: You should go for a marketplace solution if you are looking to provide the following features/services in your website:

• Multi Vendor Solution
• Ability for users to register as vendors and start selling their products on your website. All this can be done from your site's frontend which isn't the case with Multi Store/Website.
• Amazon/Ebay kind of solution

Fig: Multi Website/Multi Store (click on image to enlarge)

 2. Multi Store/Multi Website: You should go for a multi store/multi website solution in the following case:

• Use a single Magento installation to create several stores & websites which eases website maintenance related tasks.
  
• The following features are shared in a multi store setup:
• Payment Gateway (shared)
• Shipment (shared)
• Category (optional)
• Catalog is shared or not shared depending upon how you have set up your Category. If you have same category for all the stores then the products will be shared between all the stores. If you have separate categories for separate stores then the product can be restricted to each store. 
• Users are shared across all the store enabling single account log in across stores.
  
•  The following features are shared/not shared in a multi website setup, depending upon your configuration:
• Payment Gateway (Can be unique for each website)
• Shipping (Can be unique for each website)
• User account (Can be restricted or shared across websites depending upon your configuration)