Search & Discovery color filter lists every variant name

Store Design

Topic summary

Issue: Shopify Search & Discovery color filter uses manufacturer variant names (e.g., Black, Red, Forrest), creating an unmanageably large color list instead of a small set of base colors. The user does not want to rename manufacturer colors (e.g., “Forrest” should not become “Green”).

Impact:

  • 600+ color filter categories appear, many showing as blank swatch boxes (variant names without mapped colors).
  • Filtering by “black” returns products displaying non-black images because the product has a Black variant, but its default image is a different color.

Goal:

  • Map many manufacturer color names to a limited set of base colors for a compact, accurate color filter.

Additional context:

  • A screenshot is provided and central to illustrating the excessive filter list and blank swatches.

Request/Status:

  • Seeking a solution or app that can assign variants to base colors and fix filter behavior. No resolution yet; open for recommendations.
Summarized with AI on January 5. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hello,
an example Backpack has the variants: Black, Red and Forrest |These are the product/color names of the munufacturer and Forrest shouldn’t be changed to green.
The goal is to assign these variants only a few base colors to keep the filter small.
Search & Discovery is filtering by the variant names(Forrest, Dune… the manufacturer color).

This results in 600+ color filter categories (see screenshot).

Shopify.png
Shopify.png1516×888 159 KB

All the blank boxes on the left are these variant names.
As you can also see, I filtered for black, but also got other color results.
This is because the color black is a variant, available for this product but the default image is a different one.
It would be great if someone knows a solution for this, like an app.

Thanks for your help.