Shopify Combined Listings - Hide original products?

Shopify Apps
1

Hey all, I hope everyone is well.

I’m currently in the process of revamping our site for a broader customer base, and at the present time we have products listed that really should be variants instead of individual products (which they are now)

For example we have a device which is available in 5 colours, and at present it is 5 different products.

I saw that combined listings by Shopify is now live, however when using that if I choose to turn off the online store or archive or turn the individual products into drafts, the combined listing “product” gives the effect that the “variants” are out of stock.

What I’d like it to do is essentially ‘replace’ the individual products - or rather hide them so they’re not visible from the front end so that instead of 5 products, I have just 1 with variants within.

We have an extensive catalogue of products here with a long history of sales data so I’d rather not just “frankenstein” each product into 1 with variants. I was hoping Combined Listings would help but what it actually does is create an extra product linked with the rest.

I hope I’ve explained this well enough - any assistance would be much appreciated!

2

Hi @UK_Aspire_Vendo generally if a generalized apps behaviors or settings can’t fit a specific need you need to roll your own theme customizations without the app or somehow on top of it. at least for the online sales channel, multi-channel is another level of difficulty.

At it’s simplest this is just show products as variants this alternate behavior may be referred to as sibling-products in some themes, or in searching as product-families, flat-products, variantless products etc.

This does still mean each product gets published to the online-sales channel and if they shouldn’t be access adding customizations to redirect to the primary product page, or using a content gating app such as locksmith, etc.

We have an extensive catalogue of products here with a long history of sales data so I’d rather not just “frankenstein” each product into 1 with variants.

More extreme then is using either shopify-functions or order-editing apis to swap a singular products variant in the checkout or order to real stand alone product before checkout completes; with side-effects moving to in frontend analytics/tracking. The swap could also be done in the frontend /cart step but again means all involved products must be published to the online-sales channel.

If you need advanced theme customizations or feasibility exploration contact me for services.
Contact info in forum signature.
ALWAYS please provide context, examples: store url, theme name, post url(s) , or any further detail in ALL correspondence.

Good Hunting.

3

Hi @UK_Aspire_Vendo ,

You can try using the seo.hidden metafield to hide specific products from Shopify’s search and search engines. Additionally, you can manually exclude these products from your collections to further prevent visibility.

4

Hi @UK_Aspire_Vendo I see this is an old post and I am curious if you have found the solution to this problem already? We built Rubik Combined Listings Swatch app to solve this problem. Draft or archived products immediately hidden from swatches automatically. Also it will work if you turn of online store for these products as well.

5

@UK_Aspire_Vendo You can do this using Sumtracker as it supports creating products that don’t appear on your storefront but still exist for inventory tracking. So you can:

  • Keep your existing products (with all their history)

  • Or even create “hidden” ones inside Sumtracker if needed

  • Show only a single product with variants on Shopify

  • Link each variant to those backend products

  • Keep inventory syncing correctly in the background

So essentially, the products that power your inventory stay hidden, while customers only see a clean variant-based listing on the front end