Cross Link Products with Metafields or Metaobjects

Store Design
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Topic summary

Goal: Replace an app-based cross-linking setup with a Shopify-native approach that links separate products as color swatches using metafields/metaobjects, while avoiding duplicate color selectors and price display issues.

Context: Dawn theme; POD (print-on-demand) workflow requires a Shopify “Color” option on each product. Current solution uses King Product Variants to cross-link designs across colors, resulting in two color pickers (Shopify’s and the app’s). Hiding Shopify’s picker in Liquid caused the product price to stop updating when size changes.

Input requested/shared: Store URL provided; no password required. Images show the duplicate pickers and a purported result after hiding the default picker (images central to understanding the UI issue).

Guidance provided:

  • Metafields/metaobjects can achieve grouped color swatches linking separate product pages/URLs but would require extensive theme code changes.
  • Recommendation to keep using the existing app for now due to complexity and cost of refactor.
  • Immediate workaround: hide the default Shopify color option via CSS added to theme.liquid (steps given), though the actual CSS snippet was not included in the post.

Status: No confirmed resolution. Open questions remain on a robust metafield-based implementation and ensuring price updates when the default picker is hidden.

Summarized with AI on December 16. AI used: gpt-5.
5

Hello, thanks for the answer!

Now there are two Color pickers on the Product page:

Incivtus_0-1729109619093.png
Incivtus_0-1729109619093.png512×409 5.2 KB

The first Color Picker (Button) is from Shopify, because the Product has a option named color (it needs it because our POD Provider). The Second one (Swatches) are from our App that enables cross linking very complicated. We want to change it, because there are some disadvantages. For example it is very exhausting and time eating to get this running for every new product. Furthermore it is error-prone, because you have to take some steps and when doing it 2 hours its very exhausting. Last but not least it is confusing for the customers to have to Color Pickers.

So we decided to comment the first Picker out in the Liquid code. But after commenting it out, the price above wasn´t working anymore. If you choose another Size of the product, the Price disappears.

So we wanted to make a whole change in the shop, to have more efficiency and simpler for us to configure it for new products.

Best Regards

Bastian