Why won't my product variant pick in my online store?

Shopify Discussion
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Topic summary

A Shopify store owner is experiencing an issue where product variant images aren’t displaying correctly on their online store. The variant images show as null values in the JSON frontend, even though images are assigned to variants in the backend.

Initial troubleshooting attempt:

  • A developer suggested duplicating products, which successfully copied all images and resolved the issue for those duplicated items
  • However, with 400+ products, manual duplication isn’t practical

Current problem:

  • When attempting bulk duplication via CSV file export, approximately 14,000 out of 17,000 variant image URLs are missing
  • The actual images exist in the system, but their URL links are absent from the CSV export
  • Manual one-by-one product duplication appears to be the only method that properly replicates variant images with their URLs

Status: The root cause of why variant image URLs are missing from the CSV export remains unresolved. The store owner needs a scalable solution for fixing hundreds of products without manual duplication.

Summarized with AI on November 15. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Most of my products in my store doesn’t pick the variant. the app developers said that the variant image shows as null value on json front end. How to solve this issue.

website - normendy.com

Example product variant - https://normendy.com/products/modest-floral-print-dress

Screenshot at Oct 24 10-37-13 (1).png
Screenshot at Oct 24 10-37-13 (1).png634×993 109 KB

2

Hey Normendy,

Without seeing your back-end setup, if I had to take a guess, I’m thinking that you haven’t assigned images to your variants within your product settings.

See here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/product-media/add-images-variants

When a customer is on a product page and they select a variant, the image will only change if that specific variant has an image assigned to it.

I went to the link you provided above, and selected the “B solid Army Green” colour in medium, then added it to my cart. The image showing in the cart is still the first image you had as the product (the beige/white colour) rather than showing the ‘army green’ colour, which is why I don’t think you’ve assigned each variant an image.

Try following the steps listed in the help doc above, and then see if it works. If it does work, then you’ll just need to repeat this for each of your products.

Hope this helps! :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers,

Stephen

1 Like
3

Hi Steven, my variants have images on it. However a developer sugested to duplicate the product. That worked properly coz it duplicted all the images too.

However, since i have 400+ products, i tried to duplicate via the csv file. And when i extracted the csv file i saw there were 14,000 out of 17,000 variants with missing variant image URL. I have no idea why the link of the variant images were missing when the actual image is there.

However i had to manually duplicate all the products one-by-one coz thats the only way the variants will duplicate the image with its url properly.

Thanks to you too.