Selling books (variants and best practices)

Store Design
1

New to Shopify. Trying to set up a large bookstore. Looking for guidance on best way to present many “similar” products that share the same variant combos on one product page - as a single product.

For example, I have many (20+) different editions/printings (ISBNs) for Shakespeare’s Othello. I have 2 variants: Binding (paperback, hardcover, mass market paperback, etc) and condition (acceptable, good, very good, like new, new). I have this set up and working if I have only 3 (of the 20 available) distinct ISBNs on a product page - one for each binding.

The problem is if I sell out of the variant combo Paperback / Good for the ISBN I’m displaying – I want it to be replaced (automatically?) with another ISBN that has Paperback / Good copies available. Not sure if it’s the best practice to overwrite one variant with new completely info, but I can update (via API) the SKU, price, description, etc info for that one variant combo – but updating the image is tricky (especially if I didn’t include this new image when I created the product).

The goal is to have all the editions of each title (like Othello) grouped on one page. I also want a product page for each individual ISBN. If you search for Othello, I’d like the “grouped” product page to show up first (in search results) so that the user has the best choices in one place. Does Shopify have this functionality? See the examples below for how I’d like it to behave…

ThriftBooks

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-tragedy-of-othello-the-moor-of-venice-by-william-shakespeare/247448/#edition=10261429&idiq=55809297

(if you click the different conditions for the Hardcover binding, the ISBN, image, and description all change)

SecondSale
https://www.secondsale.com/p/othello/25700901

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

2

You mean you have 2 variant-OPTIONS , such as size and color, that is a Binding option and a Condition option?

And from the combinatorics of those options you have ~28 variants

It’s important to be exacting with terms used with this stuff or you’ll go off the rails real fast.

There’s no variant grouping like this among different products.

Simplest to make them all variants of a single product.

This is kinda similar to product-families , or flat products , of which there are some discussions in the forums but all presume advanced customization skills. Where every variant is it’s own standalone product and everything is stitched back together in various areas to behave like 1 product with multiple options that really just loads the individual product pages when an option is selected.

Each piece you’ve described is it’s own advanced customization complication you’d either need to hire someone for, or break apart into discrete pieces to try and tackle with random forum help.

To have different products-variants kind of behave as the same product the simplest to put them into a collection and title the collection and products for simplicity of user navigation.

Then further heavily customize collection template to behave as a product page with each product being a variant of variants.

Otherwise instead heavily modify the product templates, still often using a collection to interrelate the products.

Cycling variants based availability would need to be in the product page logic so it’s just a matter of display , or use something like shopify-flow to try and work with the variants. There are also automation apps like usemechanic that can be scripted special scenario’s though obviously nothing like this premade: https://tasks.mechanic.dev/?q=variant

Then there’s customization the search templates to prioritize the results such as showing a collection first either via liquid or frontend javascript depending on need.

If you need this customization explored on consulted you can contact me directly for services.
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