I’m building a shop that sells retro games, consoles and accessories and I’m having troubles to find the right way to structure our products.
In essence I do not know what we should handle as separate products and what we should handle as variants, since in most cases, even if we have the same game multiple times, every game is somewhat unique due to different conditions (varying signs of usage) and accessories (included manual, cardboard slide-in, …).
Example: Let’s say we sell multiple instances of Super Mario 64. Some are cartridges only, others are in their original box. Some of them have clear signs of usage on the box (scuffed, squashed, …), others are in prestine condition. Some have a manual in the box, others don’t. And even the manuals come in different conditions. All of these factors have a big influence on the price range. We have to justify the price differences by showing the above factors on multiple images (full view of all the contents, detailed views of scuffed edges and such).
Approach 1: We could set up one product for each “set” of Super Mario 64 and don’t use variants at all since as said before, they’re all “unique” in their combination of above factors. But this presents us with the following issues:
- In the category “…/nintendo/nintendo-64” we would have a ton of products for the same games (there could be 20+ just for Super Mario 64)
- How would we name the products to differentiate them in the product grid?
- If we use “Super Mario 64” as the title for all of them and somehow put icons/badges on the thumbnails to represent above factors (stars for condition, icons for cartridge, manual etc.) we’ll have issues with the url handles. Duplicates of “super-mario-64” automatically become “super-mario-65” and so on, and we would have to edit every url by hand which is not an option
- If we use the product title to represent the differences, we would still have multiple versions of say “Super Mario 64 | Cartridge, Manual” and I doubt titles like these are very SEO friendly. Even more so, if we have duplicates like “…/super-mario-64-cartridge-manual-3”
- In general I think a product grid view with a lot of instances of the same game wouldn’t be very beneficial to the shopping experience
Approach 2: We could set up one single product for “Super Mario 64” with “unique” variants for each “set” of Super Mario 64, but…
- By default variants can’t have more than one image
- How do we name the variants?
- There is a lot of theme customization needed to show that many variants in a usable fashion
- We would kind of “misuse” the variants
Approach 3: Same as approach 2 but we name every variant “Super Mario 64” and show them as products in the product grid instead of the actual “parent product”. If you click one of them, it leads to the product with the chosen variant selected. The variant picker would be hidden to “fake” it as a single product. We would have unique url’s à la “…/super-mario-64?variant=123456”, but…
- Variants still only allow a single image
- Variants don’t provide tags to filter them in the product grid (maybe metafields could be used?)
- Some usability issues apply in the same way as in approach 1
Approach 4: We use any of the approaches 1 - 3 but introduce collections for each game as in “…/nintendo/nintendo-64/super-mario-64”. This helps with browsing the products, but…
- We would have a ton (!) of collections (even though I do not know the implications of that in terms of SEO or if there are even limits to the amount of collections)
- I feel like there are one or two clicks to many to get to the product a customer might be interested in
If there is someone who had a similar use case or has ideas and thoughts in general, any input is much appreciated!