New approach to product options/variants... is it a thing?!

Shopify Discussion
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I have been trying to find a way to do as I have outlined below. Apps only cover a portion of it. I tried hiring an expert as well, all to no result. Does anyone have any advice?..

New approach to product options/variants:
On product pages, when changing the options/variants, I would like the page to show the new product variant’s title, description, all pictures, description, etc. - in place of the old product’s info. It would be as though, upon changing an option, the page loads to a new product page, but without a whole new page load - instead a dynamic changing of information shown on the page. Product variants would not be considered a child product of a master product. Every variant product would be a stand-alone product, able to be viewed on collection pages, product setup list, and inventory. They would not be considered a variant, but just a product. When setting up available options on a product edit page, the only information needed would be the option type (i.e. color), the variant name (ie. red), and the SKU (of an actual product already set up). Specifying price and quantity would not be needed, as these values would be taken from the actual product already set up, along with all other information about the new product being selected.

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This would probably be difficult to pull off since you need a custom app for this and will take awhile for it to be developed. You could ask around for someone that specializes in app development for Shopify because It’s definitely not impossible to do. Otherwise for me personally I could probably think of a way to get somewhat there but not fully complete. I was thinking if you had separate products for your options/variants you could use a tag to dynamically update the product information when changing options/variants. This will solve one problem but the rest I probably can’t do because of Shopify’s default layout (that’s when custom apps can provide it), adding more products (variant) with your three option types and other existing values. May I ask why your wanting to achieve this? just to provide a bit more context to why your wanting it like this because it sounds like a challenge and a half.

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I appreciate your input. The reason for my wanting this, hopefully is unfounded and unnecessary. I am new to shopify, and developing my store layout, before I make live to replace my existing ecommerce website of 20 years ( www.affordableagility.com - dated! But a money maker). So getting to the reason… All of my products have their own SKU. Even variations of these products, are a different product, therefore a different sku. They are in stock, ready to ship, as separate products. Inventory needs to treat every one as individual stock counts. A good portion of the products have very similar products (variants) to them. I don’t know if you know what dog agility equipment is, most people do not, so I will use a different product example… A Toyota car. I would like my Toyota car collection page to show the highlander/8cylinder, highlander/4cylinder, corolla/8cyl, coralla/4cyl. If someone clicks on highlander/8cl, they are taken to that product page, where the product pictures, description, everything that a product has as details, shows for what they clicked on. But that product page will have options for the other models, that when clicking on that option again changes all details to the option they selected. It is almost like an upsell through options. And as a matter of fact, I would most of the time be using the options with upsell in mind (no use down selling, after all, they saw the “cheaper” cars in the collection list, and chose to click on the more expensive car for a reason).

Doing as such would also provide a larger viewable inventory on a collection page. Imagine a toyota collection page, and all it has on the page is one product, the toyota - because with the way shopify is now, that product page would then have selectable variants, with limited control of descriptions, pictures, of those variants. Maybe the 8 cylinder car needs a much different description than the 4 cylinder. Maybe all images should change when selecting the corolla vs the highlander. Maybe each of those cars variants have different sku’s that need to be inventories as separate.

Now I am not sure at this juncture as to whether or not inventory management is an issue when using shopify’s current product variants method; though I am not able to find an app that allows for different descriptions, different images, all in one package.

Now if it were as simple as, when changing a product option, that the product page refreshes to a whole new product (probably not advisable, would be clunky), there comes additional benefit. An “add on’s” app would work to provide add-ons specific to the new product (variant) chosen. Each variant/option chosen would lead to it’s very own product page, that is custom TO THAT product. Preprogrammed “You may be intersted in” upsells on bottom of product page would be an option, and they would be specific to that product variant chosen.

For the life of me, I do not know why it is not this way on shopify to begin with. Unless of course what I am talking about is absolutely no good for SEO.

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Ah yeap, so I’ll just give you an explanation of what can happen if I was to go off the basis of selling your Toyota’s example. So what Shopify can do is if for example I was to base this of your Highlanders and Corollas (nice example), on the product pages you could show 1 for Highlanders and 1 for Corollas, having the overall website brand as Toyota. What will happen next is when the customer clicks on the Highlanders say to buy one it has 2 different variants as you mentioned, one for a 4 cylinder and another for an 8 cylinder. Now say if the default variant was on the 4 cylinder and the customer changes it to an 8 cylinder because that person wants an upgrade, changing the description since its a different engine, price since its more expensive and so on, then basically Shopify is pretty useless for this.

An alternative to this however could be you have a collection page (a group of models) that has a Highlander category or Corolla category. When the customer clicks on again lets say the Highlander, it shows a product page with different selection of packages you could get for the Highlander. For the sake of this alternative I’ll just name the submodel Highlanders off from the actual Toyota website, which probably doesn’t correspond to the 4 and 8 cylinder, but just for the sake of this I’ll use it. So now It’ll show a Highlander GX and Highlander GXL, the Highlander GX will have a 4 cylinder engine which is the cheapest and a Highlander GXL has an 8 cylinder which will be more expensive. The GXL could also have other upgrades like leather seats, bigger tyres, automatic transmission, etc. Now these two would be considered to be different products in my eyes since they offer different packages for the Highlander.

So just to further elaborate on what I just said. So with the different Highlander packages what you could do is have different packages that can charge the customer more because well it has more features than the others. So when they get to that actual product page, the Highlander GXL, then you can have variants in there that don’t effect the product info. This would mean that if you had a variant that changes colours it will not affect anything to do with the car information (price, description, etc).

Now for the bit more technical stuff on how Shopify can utilize this. The Highlander GX is one product with a SKU and the Highlander GXL is another product with a SKU. To put these two in a category you would add a collection tag with the name “Highlander” as a model. Shopify will display this as a collection and gives the customer the ability to click on it and look at a range of Highlanders. As far as SEO goes it should be alright since you haven’t changed anything as it will use Shopify’s existing SEO with products.

Now lets say your a car dealership and offer different branded cars like Mazda, Toyota and Hyundai that parent the same principles above, I would probably have to look into Shopify and see if there’s anything possible that can do that if that’s something you want.

I hope I’ve got my point across with how Shopify works with your example.

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I am going to like that response even before I read and understand it! Will read it closer soon and get back to you. Thank you in advance..

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With StarApps Studios Shopify apps you should be able to do what you want to do.

Their apps let you have options on products that link to other products. So you could have 4 different products for your Tire Jumps (practical, competition, breakaway, teacup) and each of these products will have options that when clicked switch to that tire jumps product page.

Then on each tire jumps product page you can have additional options to customize that tire jump and each variation of that tire jump can have its own description/images etc.

So for example we could have a collection called Tire Jumps and within it would exist 4 products (Practical Tire Jump, Competition Tire Jump, Breakaway Tire Jump, Teacup Tire Jump).

Then for instance on the Breakaway Tire Jump product page we could have a select box or buttons that would be: practical, competition, teacup. (These switch to their respective product page.)
Below those options would be select box or buttons to select: tire without frame, white tire with frame, red tire with frame. (Each of these select a variation of breakaway tire and have there own sku, inventory, description, images, etc.)

If you decide you want to give this route a try and run into problems let me know as I just built a site using these apps.

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To confuse you even more, there are Apps which will allow you to have per-variant description, like this one.

And there are apps which allow you to show only images related to currently selected variant, like this one by StarApps.

A number of upsell or product recommendation apps.

And then there is an option to do a theme modification.

There is more than one way to approach this.

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@agilityking I do not think that there is one app that would handle all of these.

However, for descriptions, I can recommend https://apps.shopify.com/dynamic-variant-description. It is written by me. The app will allow you to setup descriptions per each variant.

If you decide to give it a try feel free to from me a line at support@typefolly.zendesk.com and I can help out with any technical question you may have.

Hope it helps

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