I sell posters of airplanes. Currently I have every plane separated into various products: Poster Only, With Metal Frame, Aluminum etc. So every product has its the same general description of the plane plus a section about the materials used on which it is printed.
At the moment I am looking at changing my Shopify Debut to Dawn and to start using the Variant selector instead of having separate products. I just like the Variant Pills option on the Product page better and I think that is a better customer experience than having a customer search for a different product of the same plane.
However, if I have a paper poster of 5 sizes and add an aluminium print to it with the same 5 sizes, I end up with 10 variants but only 2 different materials on which they are printed.
With metafields I can add a description field that can hold the materials information and I managed to add that to the Product page with custom liquid. But that would mean that the 5 paper posters have the same material description and the 5 aluminium are also identical.
To me it sounds too tedious to copy paste and unneeded to have duplicate info in the database. (With a separate product you only need 1 description).
Is there a way to enter only 2 descriptions of the material used and have those linked to the 2 Variants categories? (So 1 for paper linked to 5 paper variants, and 1 for aluminum linked to the 5 aluminum variants)
Alternatively, I don’t think I so, but can I keep my posters as separate products and somehow link the aluminium product to the poster only product but then as a Variant? So they end up in the Pills selector e.g.
I don’t think I fully understand what you’re looking for (I think there are two different things), so I’m just going to throw out some ideas and hopefully something sticks:
The simplest solution would just be to have the variant names include the material, e.g. “aluminium 10x15”, “aluminium 30x40”, etc. Yes there would be lots of options but this is not unheard of.
Are you using collections? You could have each plane as a collection, and within that have a separate product for each material, and within each product have a variant for the different options. Then just put the plane description in the collection description and add code to the product-template.liquid to populate the product description page with the collection’s description.
In fact, you could add the products to multiple collections, one for the plane type and one for the material, and cycle through {% for collection in product.collections %} and have it populate the description for the plane and the material.
For related products, a related products app would probably be the best way to go. Depending on your theme (or if you manually code it yourself), you might be able to just list other products (and links to them) in the same collection somewhere in the product-template.liquid section, such as after the “Add to cart” button.
Another way to accomplish it is to use the variant metafield to store the name of the option (e.g. “aluminium”) and hard code into the product-template page something like {% for variant in product.variants %}{% if variant.metafields.fieldname == “aluminium” %}Description for aluminium{% endif %}{% endfor%}. You can add this as a language variable in Locales > en.default.json and call it from the product template page using the variable name with the “| t” filter. That way at least if you want to update the description for a particular option, you only have to do it once.
Thank you @chcsep for your feedback and thought processes.
I think you understood it quite well.
With Variant name as e.g. "aluminium 10x15"etc, you end up with dozens of variant names. Posters are say 5, with metal frame is say 4 colors in 5 sizes = 20, then 5 aluminum, and suppose you want to add some wood or acrylic, you end up with 50 or Variants before you know it.
The Collections I hadn’t thought of, with I think now around 110 products and 1400 variants that would lead to a lot of collections if I expand my products to say 300 (potentially I have 500 kinds of aircraft posters). But structurally it would work quite well.
The hard coding of the description is certainly a good one. It would require less adjustment to the liquid code itself, which is nice regarding future updates to Dawn.
I was also thinking about creating a page with the material description and then link those to the variant as a Page link. And then use a custom liquid section on the product page referencing to that page.