Product Variants

With the Product Variants app you can easily show variations of a product on the product page of a product. Suppose you sell boots and you offer the same type of boot in the colours red, green, black and white. With this app you can easily link various variants by adding the products as separate products to your webshop, and then design them as a Product Variant. You can set this up in such a way that the red boot is a variant of the grey boot, and the grey boot is logically also a variant of the red boot, etc.

Why use Product Variants instead of attributes?

- You can write custom SEO texts for each product, which improves the findability of the products.
- All variants are visible in the category view.
- Both products are found in Google, so your webshop visitor will immediately have the right variant in front of them.
- The attribute combination management is less complex if you use product variants.

Installing the app:
You first need to install the Product Variants app in the App Store. This can be found in the maintenance tool at: 'Start > App Store' under the category 'Supports'.

Manually setting up product variants with a product
Once you have installed the app you can find all the new features and settings via "Start > My Products". Open or change a product here and go to the "Links" tab.
Here you can manually link product variants.

For example, do you sell red boots and have you linked them with the grey variant?
Your web shop visitor will see the red boot on the product page, as well as the grey one he or she can easily click through to and thus end up on the product page of the other boot.

Texts Product Variants
The texts of the app product variants, such as, for example, the word "variation" above, can be easily adapted via the app: "Own Texts". You can, for example, choose to place the word version, colour or variant here instead of variation.

Product variants settings:
You can find the other settings of the product variants via: Starting point > My Webshop > Settings > Layout > Product variants.

Create product variants automatically:
You can create different product variants automatically based on the article number. If you have set up your item numbers using a separator such as '-', the part of the item number before the separator will be used to search for other products (variants). It is therefore essential that the predecessor of the article number is the same. When this setting is activated, the variants will be created in the background. This may take a few minutes, but the variants will automatically appear with the products.
Examples of this are:
Article number V01-SM: a search is made for other products where the article number starts with 'V01-'.
Article number 1900- RED-LAARS: Other products are being searched for where the article number starts with '1900-'.
Article number AA-222-5: Other products are searched for where the article number starts with 'AA-'.

If you have enabled automatic creation of product variants, then the product variants are automatically linked to each other. This applies to all products in your current range, but also when you add new products. You can also manually link new product variants yourself. You cannot delete the automatically created product variants, but you can deactivate them by checking the checkbox in the Product manager under the Links tab so that this variant is no longer visible at the frontend of your webshop.

Dividing sign:
In the separator setting you can indicate which separator you wish to use to automatically create product variants.
Note that this should only be a character, for example '-' or '_'.

Multishop in combination with product variants:
Are you using our Multishop solution and do you manage all your products from a single source? No worries! Product variants can also be managed in the Multishop management. For more information about Multishop, see this link. 

If you use the "Colours" app, you can also set it up as a product variant so that a visitor on the product page can easily switch from, for example, the black variant of the product to the red variant of the product by clicking on the corresponding colour ball. This is a setting that you can tick via: Starting point > My Webshop > Settings > Layout > Product variants > Use colour in product variant view. If no colour has been set for a product, the relevant product photo will still be displayed. We recommend that you ensure that all variants of a product have a colour so that the display is beautiful and uniform. Please note, you set this for the entire webshop. It is therefore not possible to display colour balls for one product and colour photos for another.

We will show the two examples of product variants below:

Product variants with the main photos of a product:

Product variants in combination with the colour product variant view:

Would you like to know more about how to set the colour balls for a product? Click here.