Dear Community,
we are currently facing the challenge on how to store products without and with variants and their metafields. We do have a large amount of products - without and with variants.
Product creation:
Product without variants: We create the article with one options title. We add this option title, because we can store some of our product attributes inside the product variant metafields.
Product with variants: We create the article with multiple options titles. We do store attributes in the product variant metafields aswell, so this is same as the ‘Product without variants’ point.
Frontend problem (Product without variants):
Because we add the options title, the options title is displaying on the product page. And if we see this product in some category and hower above the product - we can choose the option. But this product does not have some option actually. In the shopping kart and in the checkout process this problem occurs aswell.
We store the metafields in the product variant metafields like this, because we want to filter by the metafields. So we do have one place for the values for the product attributes.
We cannot store the metafield in the product metafields and store them inside the product variant metafields, because we then have duplicated metafields. We do have attributes like the energy efficiency class, which belongs to products and product variants.
We have found 3 possible solutions, but we are not really convinced by them, this are the current solutions:
- For each product with variants, we create extra products, so that there are no variants anymore. We then can store the metafields inside the product metafields. With some app we can group the products - so that there will be some connection between them.
The disadvantage is, that we now have multiple same products - and there might change only some unit in the product.
-
We use some app or theme and filter by TAGs. We then group the TAGs and filter by them. I spoke to some experienced colleague and he does not recommend this option - because it can be much work and this solution was used before Shopify 2.0. And i am not pretty sure how this should work.
-
We use the current form of storing products without and with variants. We revise the theme and add some rule, so that we exclude the options name, if this product has less than two variants. This would work on the product page and aswell as if we hower above the product. But inside the shopping kart and inside the checkout process - the options title is still visible and I am not sure if we can change this themes aswell? And if we need the Advanced Shopify Version or if the Shopify Version is enough?
We do prefer the third option if we can exclude the options name inside the themes. But is there some more suitable solution for this use case? Maybe someone does have some best practice for this topic.
I am looking forward to hear your suggestions 
Thanks in advance!