Here’s my dilemma; I make a universal product. Let’s say, for example, I make a universal car roof rack. Its product page is “UNIVERSAL CAR ROOF RACK”. Great. However, my competitor makes a roof rack that is specific to each model of vehicle. So they make a roof rack specifically for Honda. Specifically for Toyota. etc.
So what’s happening is when people search “Toyota roof rack” my competitor comes up because they have product listings with unique SEO terms of “Roof rack for Toyota Corolla” whereas mine is for all cars.
So I want to make a product listing that says, “Roof rack for Toyota Corolla” but it’s just my universal roof rack. Is there any way to have a product listing but link it to the main universal product? I did try making individual pages for each vehicle make and then just putting the universal product at the bottom, but then I don’t show up on Google shopping because it’s not a product listing, it’s just a page. But I also don’t want to make 20 products that are “Roof Rack for Honda” “…Toyota” “…BMW” etc. and then have to track inventory for every single one even though it’s all for the same universal roof rack.
Is there any way to list each as a unique product but have the inventory linked to the main parent product (the universal one)?
You have some options but none most likely what you are trying to achieve
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Create a unique product each time, you can use inventory managers or product tools to help you do this so it’s quicker than manually doing it each time
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You can use variants on the current product and then change the Shopify url based on variant to attempt to get Google to index it
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You could build headless, this way you can utilise your one product and write code on your own site that generates products from this universal product
I think though if you want to stay fully in the confines of the Shopify platform then it’s a product per car make as your competitor to give you the best SEO chance. Again use an product manager to help you speed up this process
We have an automation app called mesa that you could use to sync up the inventory between these different products.
Here’s what the workflow would look like:
You could define the inventory-linked products in a metafield under the main product, and then this workflow would go through every time inventory levels are updated on the main product and sync them up to the linked products.
Sorry now that I’m thinking more about this, I think all you need to use is the shopify bundles app: https://apps.shopify.com/shopify-bundles
For each of the unique SEO-driven product pages, you could create them as a “bundle” where the only product included in the bundle is the primary universal product.
