Managing a store that is using what I call “fake” variants to achieve “variant functionality”. What I mean is that the store can’t use the “Shopify variants” for its product because of multiple limitations/reasons, so the “variants” are actually separate/individual products, but are displayed as “variants” on pages (variant pills with links).
This is fine, but each product has 7 different “variants”. This causes issues in product descriptions as they all need to be the same, but if you change the description on product A-1, you have to remember to change it on product A-2, A-3, A-4 and so on. That’s a lot to remember and a lot of work.
Anyone know of a way to set the description once (in product A-1) and then reference that info for the descriptions in products A-2, A-3, A-4…etc? Code? Meta fields? Apps?
Add a tag to all related product with unique keyword and create view.
now you will able to download all the products as CSV edit them and reupload the file to update all products at once.
this is not the best solution as you have to remember the unique tags related to each other, and if you missed to attach tag to any product that will be difficult to find that.
Using an APP
Please refer to the below video about the APP we built for our clients.
App will create group of products and will give option to to enter description which will be pre-filled with product existing description.
After submitting the form description will be replaced in all the associated products.
There’s two way I can think of to solve this. I’ve written a quick description of each below but let me know if you want more detail on either
Using Metaobjects
With metaobjects you could create a new ‘type’ of data for your store (in the same way your store has ‘products’, ‘orders’ etc..) that would hold the description. Then you would have to link each product with your new description using a metaobject reference product metafield. Then when you wanted to edit the descriptions you would edit the metaobject entries in the Content → Metaobjects section of the Shopify admin.
The advantage to this is that you would just need to update the description once and it would show for all products.
There’s a few disadvantages though:
It’s confusing (even writing out “metaobject reference product metafield” caused me to pause)
You would need to update your theme to display the standardized description instead of the normal Shopify product description
Other apps might depend on the regular Shopify description field and still use that (for example, if you’re sending your products to Google Shopping)
Bulk editing to update the descriptions
There’s various bulk editing apps that you could use to set the descriptions to multiple products in bulk. For example, with our Ablestar Bulk Product Editor you could probably do something like:
Add a tag (or some other way) to identify the ‘primary’ products
Export the primary product descriptions to a spreadsheet
Re-upload that spreadsheet to bulk edit the descriptions for the ‘fake variant’ products
I think you should also be able to set this up to run automatically on an interval to keep things in check. If you’re interested in learning more we can put together a quick video showing you how it’d work.
The advantages to this are:
You can keep editing the primary product descriptions in the Shopify admin
You can be sure the descriptions will be read by other apps
But this does require another app to get everything working.
Hope this all helps sounds, happy to answer any other questions you might have.