Minimize Variants for Bakery Products

[ChefLotus]

Hello, 

I am trying to add a 1st Birthday Bundle to my bakery site. It will feature a 2 tier cake and a smash cake. I like to offer variety in flavors for each cake. The big cake is essentially two separate cakes that are stacked, so I want to add the option of choosing a different flavor for each cake. When I added the drop down options, it created too many variants. I would like to add 8 flavors for the tiers and 5 for the smash cake. I keep getting the "over 100 variants' message. What should I do? I need to be able to offer flavors options for each tier. 

Thanks!

[PaulNewton]

Hi @ChefLotus 👋🎂 Shopify products are currently* limited to 3 options, or a max of 100 variants.

If there is any option that does not effect price/inventory try to gather that information as line-item-properties through a theme customization instead of being a productOption.

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-design/product-pages-get-customization-information-for-produ...

Or you could try to do this as a bundle with each part being a separate component.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/bundles 

This does mean different inventory/skus, etc so in some use cases you will need an inventory sync app, or service, to keep items that share inventory automatically at the same stock levels.

Tons of apps for that on the app store, for custom inventory scenarios https://tasks.mechanic.dev/?q=sync 

Good Luck.

*In the future there will be a 2k variant limit, but this is currently only in developer preview (aka beta)

[ChefLotus]

Hello,

Thank you for responding.

I don't want them to have different skus. Thebundle is one sku with choice
of three flavors.

It is a bundle of one two tiered cake and one mini smash cake. I just want
them to be able to pick 3 flavors - one for each cake from a drop down.
Smash cake ‐ flavor, tier 1 - flavor, tier 2 - flavor. That's it. This just
seems so complicated 😕

[PaulNewton]

The variant and inventory systems use case was built to be as simple as possible for reasonable limits initally for selling t-shirts so anything else will pretty much always be more complex until the system changes.

If the differing flavors don't change the price ,or the sku, or the inventory implement the choices as line-item-properties per the guide above.

Alternatives for your use case may be to try and join the first two options into a single option to try and get under the 100 limit maybe?

i.e. "Tiered Cake Flavors"

• vanilla/chocolate
• chocolate/chocolate
• chocolate/strawberry
• strawberry/vanilla
• etc

But even then the combinatorics may pile up past 100 fast.

Or make separate products for a base flavor.

In this situation for example you could have customers go to a collection page of products to select an initial starting flavor.

Then the only options are the 2nd and 3rd flavor when on the product description page because the first flavor is predetermined.

Note: skus can be non-unique in shopify so different products can share the same sku; but this does not enable any additional behavior such as inventory pooling or reporting, etc.

More advanced is with the separate products but use advanced theme customizations to present them as a singular product, aka sibling-products similar to the combined-listings feature for shopify plus .

If you need that type of customization or consulting you can contact me for services.
Contact info in forum signature.
ALWAYS please provide context, examples: store url, theme name, post url(s) , or any further detail in ALL correspondence.

Good Luck.