Products and Variants
Products are held at two levels, and understanding the split is the key to the whole catalogue.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Carts — the cart itself and its options
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — then View Data on the cart table, and look for the row actions
Master product and variant
- The master product carries what is true of the thing in general: name, brand, category, type, images, videos, a parent SKU, and whether it is published.
- Each variant carries what differs: SKU, price, currency, weight, minimum and maximum order quantity, its own images and videos, and whether it is approved.
A shirt is one master product; small, medium and large blue are variants.
Get the split right first
The commonest catalogue mistake is putting variants at master level — a separate product for every size — which multiplies the listing, splits the reviews, and makes filtering useless.
The test: would a customer consider these the same thing in a different form? If yes, they are variants.
Option sets generate variants
Rather than creating each by hand. Define the option sets for a master product — size, colour, finish — and their values, and the variants can be generated from the combinations.
This is worth using even for a handful of variants, because it keeps the option values consistent. Hand-created variants drift into "Blue", "blue" and "Navy Blue" within a month.
Prices and weights live on the variant
Which is usually right — a large costs more and weighs more. It also means changing a price is a per-variant job, so a catalogue-wide price change is a bulk operation rather than a single edit.
Order limits are per variant too
Minimum and maximum order quantity. Useful for trade shops selling in cases, and for protecting limited stock from a single buyer clearing it.
Publication and approval are separate
A master product is published or not; a variant is approved or not. Both must be right for a customer to buy it, which is a feature rather than an inconvenience — it is what allows a vendor to prepare a listing that nobody can buy yet.
Descriptions are per language
Product detail — the name override, description and search metadata — is held per language against the product, and carries its own approval and revision. So a shop can be genuinely multilingual, and a translation can be reviewed before it appears.
Worked example
A clothing shop holds one master product per garment with colour and size option sets, generating variants from the combinations. Prices differ by size, weights differ by size, and the maximum order quantity is set on limited lines. Descriptions exist in English and Welsh, each approved separately.
Recommendations
- Decide master versus variant before loading anything.
- Generate variants from option sets to keep values consistent.
- Use publication and approval to stage a listing.
- Set maximum order quantity on limited stock.