Question

How are Composite Products and Packaged Products different?

Setup

• Retail POS for Mac or PC

Answer

In Retail POS, Composite Products and Packaged Products are similar but use different workflows.

To better understand what each is used for and decide which best fits your intended workflow, refer to the explanations below:

Composite Product

A Composite Product is a product category made up of specified quantities of one or more different products already . These are ideal for creating gift packs or product bundles.

You can also use composite products for fractional stock, which can be useful if you sell products at different quantities such as grams or millilitres (e.g selling wine by the glass).

Composite Products do not have their own inventory levels, instead drawing on the inventory level of each component product within the Composite. They also cannot be ordered from a supplier or transferred to another outlet, this must be done for each individual component product.

To learn more about how to create a Composite Product, refer to our Composite Product guide.

Packaged Products

Packaged Products are a single product (e.g a bottle of beer) that is available in multiple pack sizes (12 pack, 6 pack, and Single) throughout the many in store workflows in Retail POS.

Packaged Products can be ordered in large package sizes, sold as is, or broken down to smaller sizes when you receive them and then sold to your customers in different pack sizes. 

Inventory levels are held by each pack size and can be broken down to quickly shift inventory to smaller pack sizes when required. 

To learn more about how to create a Packaged Product, refer to our Packaged Product guide.