Variants & Families

Variants are products which are grouped under a master product from which they can inherit properties, e.g. assets, technical fields, - basically any product attributes shared by all the variants.

Which properties are inherited and which are not is controlled using the product field settings. For each field/property, you can define if it is allowed to be different on variants or not. If it isn't, the value set on the master product is inherited to each variant.

There are two types of variant setups:

• Product Variants are products which are different from each other in their variant combinations, e.g. small, black, large, green, and so on
• Product Families are products which are grouped together but (for various reasons) don't have variant combinations assigned

You can read more about each type of variant below.

Variants

Variants are products which are essentially identical except for certain key variant dimensions such as colour, size, etc. For example, if you’re a retailer selling t-shirts you may have the same t-shirt in:

• 3 different sizes (Small, Medium, Large)
• 3 different colours (Black, White, Blue).

This corresponds to 9 possible unique combinations:

• Small, Black
• Medium, Black
• Large, Black
• Etc.

To handle this type of setup you create variant groups - like colour or size - and then use the variant groups tool and variant combinations tool to either create or assign the variant combinations you want to make available.

You can also use the Combine-tool to combine existing products from a product list as variants.

Product Families

Product families are products which are grouped as variants but don't have variant combinations assigned to them.

To handle this type of setup you don't need to create variant groups at all, instead you can use the Combine-tool to combine existing products as a family, or open the variant combinations tool for a an existing master product and add products to the family.