Attribute values not showing up in configurable product

Question

I am having a little problem with a configurable product. The configurable product is a sofa with two attributes used to customize the sofa: fabric and color.

I created a new attribute set for Sofa and added those two attributes in an attribute group called Sofa Options.

I created a couple of simple products:

Sofa black velvet Sofa blue velvet Sofa red velvet Sofa black microsuede Sofa blue microsuede

And one configurable product sofa with all of those simple products as associated products.

Now when I go to the front end and I select color black for instance I would expect to see the fabric dropdown selectbox being populated with velvet and microsuede. However it only shows microsuede. The same problem when I select blue. I only see velvet in the fabric dropdown box.

I double-checked all the simple products for the color and fabric attributes and they are all set correctly. I also flushed the cache and re-indexed. Any ideas what could be causing this behavior?

Edit: Ooph, this is painful. Turns out those simple products had Status Disabled somehow. I still don't understand how I could have missed that and also unsure why they were set to Disabled to begin with, because I'm 100% sure that I did not disable them manually.

Anyway thanks for the suggestions and help.

• pspahn: Are those other simple products currently 'out of stock'?
• Ruben: @pspahn I turned off Manage Stock in the System settings and also Display Out of Stock Products is set to On. Any other ideas?
• Marius: @Ruben Even if the you have "Display Out of stock products", when retrieving the configurable options there is a check to see if the simple products are salable. So make sure your simple products are in stock.
• Sander Mangel: Could you please mention your Magento version and any 3th party plugins you're might be using. The more info the better :)

Answer 1

You should check product attributes:

• Status
• Visibility
• Websites
• Category
• Stock options

Use this free extension to check if products are visible or nor. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/netresearch-productvisibility.html

Answer 2

Please check if all the products are visible on frontend and enable.
Also check if they are in same store and website.

Answer 3

Check both simple products and configurable products is selected in the manage Attributes screen Apply to section. Both the simple configurable product and the simple product associated with the configurable product shall have the same attributes so it shall apply to both. Manage attribute screen Apply to selection

Answer 4

The tab on the product detail page that shows a list of product attributes will only show the attributes and their values assigned for that product. If it's a configurable product, it will not show the attributes for the simple products, because there could be more than one value.

If you want information to appear there, assign the attributes and values to the configurable product and they should appear.

Also for the attributes to appear on the Product View Page, you must make sure that the Visible on Product View Page on Front-end is set to Yes for that product.

1. Go to Catalog> Attributes> Manage Attributes
2. Click the attribute you want to appear on the product view page.
3. Set the option Visible on Product View Page on Front-end to Yes
4. Hit the Save button and flush your Magento caches.

Your attributes will now on the product view pages for the products they are directly assigned to.