Question

I’m working on a Magento-powered jewelry store and the sample ring I added as a product, I
created a custom option for Ring Size (a SELECT drop down).

Easy enough.

My question is this – how can I apply that custom option to ALL products within the Rings
category?

Answer 1

Looks like you’re wrong with the idea of using custom options here. If you’re planning to use Ring Size for all of your Rings products, it’s better to create a Ring Size attribute, add it to “Rings” Attribute Group, and use this attribute group to create your Rings products.

Update. You need to use the Configurable product type for your rings product. Here’s the manual how to create a Configurable product.

To wrap it up – here’s the brief description of Configurable products functional: The actual “configurable” product is a virtual “container” that contain simple physical items with concrete attribute option within itself.

In your case you will create a Configurable product that is configured by the attribute Ring Size. Then you will create some simple product, each with it’s own Ring Size option. After simple products are created, you will assign them to the configurable product, so the customer will have the ability to choose the desired Ring Size on the frontend.

Just don’t forget to mark Ring Size attribute as “is used to create configurable products” duting the attribute creation.