Product Variants

Product variants are the different versions of one product. A t-shirt is one product, and small blue, medium blue and medium black are three variants of it. Size, colour and material are the usual options, but a shop can use anything at all, from length to flavour to memory size.

What matters is what the system holds against each variant instead of against the product as a whole. Stock comes first, because if you have four medium blue shirts and none in large, the page has to say so before the customer pays rather than after. Price comes next, since a large size often costs more and some materials cost a lot more than others. The photo is the third, because a customer who picks black wants to see black, and a page that keeps showing blue loses the sale.

Shops usually get this wrong in one of two ways, and both are easy to fall into. Some create a separate product for every colour, so the catalogue fills with near-copies and the same shirt appears eleven times in the search results. Others put everything under one product with a single stock number, and then sell a size they ran out of two days ago. The second mistake costs more, because it ends in a refund and an apology, and Linkysoft has rebuilt more than one catalogue that started this way.

Each variant also needs its own code, which is the short reference staff read out loud in the stockroom. Storek gives every variant its own code, its own count and its own price, so the shop counter and the website read the same number. That is the whole point, because a sale at the till should lower the stock the website shows within seconds.

There is a cost people underestimate, because twelve colours in five sizes is sixty variants, and somebody has to photograph, count and price all sixty. So before you set the options up, ask how many combinations you actually sell, since many shops find that six of the sixty carry most of the money. When Linkysoft plans a shop web application, we ask for last year's sales by size and colour first, because that list decides how the whole catalogue is built. It is a dull question that saves months.