I have a woodworking website that is selling wood for people to make pens, cutting boards, bowls, etc. In my products I have the different species of wood. For example, Walnut. I have each size listed as an individual variant, 3/4” x 3/4” x 6”, 1.5” x 1.5” x 18”, etc etc. Some species have 10 variants, some have less. Overall I have 60 or so different species. I want a way to take specific variants from specific species and create a collection from that. How can I do this??
I assume it involves creating custom code to make it work? I had done that, but it’s a pain to add the variants, would love to have a decent UI to do it. Even if I need to download an app, but can’t justify paying an extreme amount each month
Hello @NelsonWoodworks
Welcome to the Shopify Community! Please share your store URL and password (if it’s password-protected), so I can check and provide you with the exact solution.
- In Shopify, collections are based on products, not variants.
2 . If only a few variants from each product matter, you can create new products for those specific variants and add them to a manual collection.
For example, create a product like:
Walnut Block – 1.5” x 1.5” x 18”
Cherry Block – 3/4” x 3/4” x 6” - Then include these specific items in a manual collection like “Best Sellers”.
Third-party apps make it easy to separate variants. I own the Stamp – Collection Variants app , and we help merchants display variants separately on the collection page and home page. You can customize the settings per collection to show or hide specific variants, filter variants, or separate them by specific options. For example, you can create a “Gold” collection and display only gold-related variants.
@NelsonWoodworks this is a tricky one because, as others have mentioned, Shopify collections are product-based, not variant-based. So when you try to build a “Pen Blanks” collection pulling specific sizes across 60 species, the native tools just won’t do it.
Duplicating products for each size (as suggested above) would technically work, but with 60 species and multiple sizes each, you’d end up managing hundreds of individual product listings. That’s not realistic long term.
Since you mentioned wanting a decent UI without a lot of hassle, Variantify lets you pick specific variants to display on specific collection pages. So you could build a “Pen Blanks” collection showing only the 3/4" x 3/4" x 6" variants across all your wood species, each as its own card. No code to maintain, and adding new variants is done through the app’s interface rather than editing Liquid. It also has a free trial so you can test the setup before committing.