Consistent Name Schema for Products & Fixed Reporting

[benpatjohn]

Hello all! Supply chain has become very important for my store, so I'm working on creating some demand curves to help with reorder models. With that being said, my data is a bit of a mess. For example, we sell technical apparel, and we sell that apparel in different colors, sizes, and styles. Recently, when pulling an inventory report, results were coming up as SIZE/COLOR & COLOR/SIZE. I have three questions:

1) How can I correct this so everything pulls up as COLOR/SIZE in the report?
2) If I make these changes, will it affect previous data so my reports look clean?

3) Does anyone have a systematic approach for "Product Organization" that simplifies this?

Thank you so much!

[CloudlabSam]

This is likely due to the fact that your options weren't entered consistently. In the traditional variant mode, you have 3 "options" for organizing your data. In your case it seems like you want color to always be option 1 and size to always be option 2. But when your products were entered it seems that they were done inconsistently, with a mix of size and color in the two options.

The best way to fix this would be to create a list of those that have the size in option 1 and swap them. I'd test first to see if this causes new variant ids to be created or preserves the old ones, just with new options. 

[benpatjohn]

Unfortunately, unless I'm missing something, both are entered consistently. I have random one off moments where something like "Black / 4XL" & then "4XL / Black" appear, both having the same SKU and are the same product. I have screenshots, but not sure what else to try here. I might just have to organize data by SKU in this case and create pivot tables.  

[CloudlabSam]

It would be interesting to see where you have the same SKU being represented differently in two places. Might help in understanding a path to solving.

[benpatjohn]

Great question! The report is "Sales by product variant SKU"