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Contents

Products

Here’s all you need to know about products and the relationship between options and variants.

In the below documentation we will be covering:

What is a product?

Online products are the digital representation of the physical items you are selling online. A product contains information such as title, collection, description, vendor, product type and images. Each product must contain at least one variant. For example, if you sell shoes, your product may have the following properties:

  • Title: Pegasus 2
  • Description: A lightweight running shoe for the road.
  • Collection: Sports Shoes
  • Vendor: Athletics Co Ltd
  • Type: Running Shoe

This product may be available in multiple sizes and may come in several colours. Each variant for the above product would have a unique size / colour combination.

What are product options?

Product options allow you to add product variants to individuals products. The most common example of a product option in ecommecre is size. In the above shoe example, the product would have two options, namely:

  • Size (Small / Medium / Large)
  • Colour (Green / Red / Blue)

What are variants?

A variant contains information about each product option such as SKU, weight, price and availability (stock levels). In the above shoe example, you may hold three different sizes in three colours. The variants would look like this:

Product option Matrix

We end up with nine variants, each with a unique combination of options.

Handling variation when importing into Stock2Shop

When importing data into Stock2Shop, we need to be able to define the above parent-child relationship in a flat data structure (spreadsheet). In order to do this, we have some field conventions, namely:

  • source_product_code: This is the unique identifier for each parent product.
  • source_variant_code: This is the unique identifier for each child variant.
  • option1_name: This describes the option (e.g. size)
  • option1_value: This is the size value for this variant (e.g. Size 8)
  • option2_name: Describing the option (e.g. colour)
  • option2_value: This is the colour value for this variant (e.g. Red)

Stock2Shop can accommodate a maximum of three options per product.

To find out how to enrich products in bulk via importing data to your Stock2Shop console, read here.