How to manage color variants for fishing rods without additional SKUs?

[blankfishingrod]

Hey everyone!

I have a question about product options and variants. To make things simple, I sell blank fishing rods through my shopify store. An option that we have for our blanks is to coat the blanks a color like clear, blue, purple and green at an additional cost. I understand that I can create an option for this as a “color” and the variants would be the color options, like clear, blue, purple and green. However, when doing this shopify creates those variants as additional skus which makes things more complicated from an inventory stand point.

Ideally, there would be a drop down menu with each of the coating options with a price next to the color indicating the additional cost.

There is an app that might do this for us, but I thought I’d ask the community to see if someone else has gone through something similar.

Thank you!

[Victor_5]

Hi @blankfishingrod ,

Thanks for getting in touch with your question. You are correct in saying that if you offer these colour options Shopify will display variant-level fields, such as price and SKU. If you do not wish to issue specific SKU numbers for variants you do not have to and can leave that field blank.

One alternative option you can consider is using a custom product app, of which there are many on the Shopify App Store. Apps such as Infinite Options allow you to list these different colour options without having them listed as individual variants in the back end, and may prove to be a more appropriate option for you when it comes to inventory management and reporting. I would recommend giving some of these apps a try to see if they suit your needs.

[shopfy-2020]

Honestly, no one should have to pay extra monthly fees and install apps to have basic functional features to list products in variants or options to work… That’s what they pay Shopify fees for.

[Williampat369]

Hi Blankfishingrod,

You add variants to a product that comes in more than one option, such as size or color. Each combination of option values for a product can be a variant for that product. For example, suppose that you sell T-shirts with two options: size and color. The size option has three values: small, medium, and large.

The Shopify customizer apps allow merchants to sell customizable products in their e-commerce store

Find out the best Shopify product customizer apps for your e-commerce store.

Smart Product Options:

Smart Product Options is a fantastic tool that allows your customers to creatively design the products they are going to purchase. Unlimited Product Options and Creates an unlimited custom product fields including text, numbers, swatches, checkboxes, dropdown menus, radio buttons, file uploads and more.

Easy to set up, Flexible Conditional Logic, Add-On Pricing, Group Fields into Option Groups and reuse them, Price Add-On’s, Field Types and Support Team

Custom Product Builder:

Custom Product Builder app is super easy to set up and applies to any product type. You can enable personalization and customization for furniture, accessories, gifts & promotional products, pet toys, bags, clothes, sports accessories & trophies, wheeled devices, accessories for mobile devices, print-on-demand products, neon signs, dimensions based & weight priced products.

[EasifyApps-Zoe]

Hi @blankfishingrod ,

I noticed that you’ve already found a solution for setting up custom options on your site. That’s awesome! However, I wanted to share my solution as well, to help other members who might be facing a similar issue.

As you said, when using the default features on Shopify, setting up custom options can get complicated, especially when it comes to inventory management. Additionally, there are limitations on the number of options and variants you can create. That’s why I recommend using a third-party app like Easify Product Options . It makes setting up and managing options much easier.

With this app, you can choose from different styles like color swatches, image swatches, or dropdown menus (with or without images) for your options. It even allows you to assign different prices to each option effortlessly.

To give you a better idea, I’ve created three examples to demonstrate how to set up options using the app:

1. Color swatches:

2. Image swatches:

3. Dropdown with images:

I know you may already be using a product options app, but it’s always good to keep alternatives in mind. If your current app doesn’t fully meet your needs or if you’re looking for a budget-friendly option, I suggest considering theEasify Product Options app .