List one product with its colours and sizes as options, not a separate product for each. Reviews, search signals and stock then stay together, and the photograph should change when the customer picks a colour.

Five shirts that are really one

An online store sells a t-shirt in five colours. Instead of one product with a colour choice, it has five: the same name with a colour on the end, the same description, and prices that are meant to match.

It happens for ordinary reasons. The store was set up before anyone knew about variants, or each colour arrived in a different season, or a spreadsheet import created one product per row.

It looks harmless, and the shirts still sell. But it costs more than it appears to.

What the duplicates cost

The second costs the most, quietly. Reviews persuade, and twelve reviews spread across five pages make five products that each look barely tried.

What search engines make of it

Five pages with the same text give a search engine a choice it would rather not make. Google tends to show one and quietly set the others aside.

The one it picks may not be the one you would choose. It may be the colour that sold out, or the one with no reviews.

Links are divided the same way. A blogger who mentions the shirt links to whichever colour they bought, so the credit one page could have gathered is split five ways.

Google Shopping's product feed even has a field for grouping variants, so that one item in five colours is understood as one product.

How variants work

A variant is one version of a product: a colour, a size, a material. Variants share the product's name, description and reviews, while each keeps its own price, stock count, code and photograph.

The customer picks from a menu or a row of swatches, and the price, stock and photograph update to match. The order records exactly which version was bought.

WooCommerce calls this a variable product; Shopify calls the versions variants. Either way, each combination keeps its own stock code, so the stockroom and the accounts see what they saw before.

Photographs that change with the choice

The most common half-finished version has variants set up, but the photograph stays on the navy whichever colour the customer picks.

A customer who chooses grey and still sees navy starts to wonder what will arrive. Some email to check. Others do not bother.

Attach a photograph to every colour, so choosing grey shows grey. Most platforms do this with one setting per variant.

Crop the swatches from those photographs rather than picking colours by eye, which rarely match the fabric. And check that the cart thumbnail and the order confirmation email show the colour actually chosen.

Where the line falls

Not every similar item is a variant. The test is the description: if it would be identical apart from one word, the items are versions of one product.

A shirt in five colours passes. A men's and a women's cut, with different measurements and sizing charts, probably does not, and may work better as two products that link to each other.

Price alone does not decide it. An extra-large that costs two dollars more is still the same shirt.

A worked example

A screen printer in East Vancouver sold its own designs online: twelve designs, each printed on shirts in five colours.

Every colour had been added as its own product, with sizes in a drop-down menu. The shop page showed sixty tiles, and the newest designs sat four screens down.

The best-selling design had its reviews spread across five pages, and the charcoal version had none. In search results, Google showed the page for a discontinued colour, left up as sold out.

The rebuild made each design one product with colour and size options. Each colour got its own photograph, the swatches were cropped from those photographs, and the existing reviews were moved onto the combined products.

The old colour pages were redirected to the new ones, and the discontinued colour was removed. The shop page now shows twelve tiles, and the whole range fits on one screen.

Moving to variants without losing anything

Merging products is a small migration, best done by whoever built the store, in a quiet week rather than just before a sale.

For each group, keep the product with the most reviews and links, and add the others to it as variants with their own codes and stock counts.

Move the reviews across; on some platforms that means an export and an import.

Then redirect each old product address to the combined page, so bookmarks, emails, search results and Pinterest pins all arrive somewhere useful. Past orders keep their original descriptions, so the accounts are unaffected.

Sizes, stock and the default choice

Do not preselect a size. A customer who misses the default orders a medium by accident, and the exchange costs postage both ways.

Show which combinations are out of stock in the menu itself, rather than with an error after the customer clicks.

Put the size chart beside the size menu, not on a separate page. And when a colour is gone for good, remove the variant instead of leaving it to disappoint people.

The counter-case

Some stores split colours on purpose, and sometimes they are right to.

For products chosen mainly by colour, such as yarn, a category page showing every colour as its own tile can make browsing easier. Some themes can show colours in the grid while keeping one product behind them.

Very large ranges can hit a platform's limit on variants per product and have to be split by style. And a store with a handful of products can leave this for its next rebuild.

For most stores, though, one product per item, with colour and size as options, keeps everything together.

The order to do it in

  1. List every near-duplicate product in the store.
  2. Pick the page to keep in each group.
  3. Add the rest as variants with their codes.
  4. Attach a photograph to every colour.
  5. Move the reviews onto the kept product.
  6. Redirect the old addresses to the new page.
  7. Leave the size unselected by default.

Step six is the one most often skipped, and the one that decides whether anything is lost. Without redirects, every old link to a colour page ends at an error, along with whatever standing that page had in search.

What happens once the customer has chosen, at the shipping step, is covered in shipping costs revealed at the last step.

Frequently asked questions

What is a product variant?

One version of a product, such as a colour or a size. Variants share a name, description and reviews, while each keeps its own price, stock, code and photograph.

Why not list each colour separately?

It clutters category pages, splits reviews across several pages, lets details drift apart, and gives search engines several near-identical pages to choose between.

Should the photograph change with the colour?

Yes. Attach an image to each variant so that choosing grey shows grey. A customer who picks one colour and sees another starts to doubt what will arrive.

When are separate products the right choice?

When items differ in more than one way, such as a different cut, measurements and sizing chart, or when a very large range exceeds the platform limit.

What happens to the old product pages?

Redirect each old address to the combined product, so links, bookmarks and search results arrive at the right page instead of an error.

Should a size be selected by default?

No. Customers who do not notice the default order the wrong size. Leave the choice empty and ask them to pick one before adding to the cart.

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.

Five products where one would do?

Send us the store address. We will show you which products to merge and how to move them safely.

Start a Conversation