Shopify Combined Listings - Hide original products?

[UK_Aspire_Vendo]

Hey all, I hope everyone is well.

I'm currently in the process of revamping our site for a broader customer base, and at the present time we have products listed that really should be variants instead of individual products (which they are now)

For example we have a device which is available in 5 colours, and at present it is 5 different products.

I saw that combined listings by Shopify is now live, however when using that if I choose to turn off the online store or archive or turn the individual products into drafts, the combined listing "product" gives the effect that the "variants" are out of stock.

What I'd like it to do is essentially 'replace' the individual products - or rather hide them so they're not visible from the front end so that instead of 5 products, I have just 1 with variants within.

We have an extensive catalogue of products here with a long history of sales data so I'd rather not just "frankenstein" each product into 1 with variants. I was hoping Combined Listings would help but what it actually does is create an extra product linked with the rest.

I hope I've explained this well enough - any assistance would be much appreciated!

[PaulNewton]

Hi @UK_Aspire_Vendo generally if a generalized apps behaviors or settings can't fit a specific need you need to roll your own theme customizations without the app or somehow on top of it. at least for the online sales channel, multi-channel is another level of difficulty.

At it's simplest this is just show products as variants  this alternate behavior may be referred to as sibling-products in some themes, or in searching as product-families, flat-products, variantless products etc.

This does still mean each product gets published to the online-sales channel and if they shouldn't be access adding customizations to redirect to the primary product page, or using a content gating app such as locksmith, etc.

We have an extensive catalogue of products here with a long history of sales data so I'd rather not just "frankenstein" each product into 1 with variants.

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More extreme then is using either shopify-functions or order-editing apis to swap a singular products variant in the checkout or order to real stand alone product before checkout completes; with side-effects moving to in frontend analytics/tracking. The swap could also be done in the frontend /cart step but again means all involved products must be published to the online-sales channel.

If you need advanced theme customizations or feasibility exploration contact me for services.
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Good Hunting.