Product variants
Sizes, colours and materials with their own stock, barcode and price per combination.
A variant is a buyable version of a product: this jacket, in navy, in medium. It is the difference between a catalogue and a shop, and it is where most stock problems begin.
How it works
- Each variant carries its own SKU, barcode, price and stock figure. The parent product is a grouping, not a thing you can sell.
- Marketplace listings map to variants rather than to parents, because a marketplace listing is one buyable item.
- A variant can be discontinued without removing the product it belongs to.
Why the parent must not hold stock
The most common integration bug in ecommerce is a sync that reads the parent product’s quantity. A parent with fifteen variants has no meaningful stock figure — any number it reports is either a sum, which oversells the sizes you have run out of, or a copy of one variant, which is arbitrary.
Stock is held and pushed per variant throughout, for exactly that reason.
What it does not do
Variants are not a configurator. If the combinations run into the hundreds and you make to order, the right tool is configure to order — a product with six choices of four options is four thousand variants you will never stock.
Stop reconciling stock by hand
One catalogue, six channels, one stock figure that stays right.