One shared product.json file with different sections for each product

To start of, i’m a beginner in Shopify (though i have multiple years of experience in Magento). I’ve read a lot of documentation already but i’ll just go ahead and ask my question.

I’ve started working on an older theme (based of Narrative) and i’ve followed a Shopify tutorial on how to transform the product.liquid to product.json in order to be able to use sections. This works fine. Now, on our webshop, we have only a handful of products but currently they share their content because there is only one product.json file. My goal was to create different product[name].json files in order to differentiate those products. I would then link that template file to the respective product. Now, i noticed that every change i do within “customize theme”, it updates the product.json file with new sections (obviously). But that also means that, if i were to create a default template with various sections which all products should have, i would need to copy the contents of product.json to the other newly created per-product-json-files. Correct? After which, further differentation is needed per product, i would use the customize theme button and do my thing (eg adding various product-specific sections).

Is this the way to go?

Boiling this down to that line , Yes the settings in the sections of JSON alternate templates would not get automatically updated from settings of the entirely separate default template used by all products.

There’s also still using a liquid alternate template or as the default template.

You can still reference global theme settings from settings_schema in sections and snippets that end up getting used in JSON templates however.

You can still reference global theme settings from settings_schema in sections and snippets that end up getting used in JSON templates however.

How would i do such a thing?

As simple as using setting.settingnameofinterest in liquid code.

Learn to use theme settings here

https://shopify.dev/themes/architecture/settings

Or examine your current themes usages of settings code