Product Variants

Product variants are created by adding multiple products grouped by the same item_group_id field. This field typically corresponds to the parent SKU, although you can use any other ID to group variants together.

Incorrect — “CoolShirt123” is sent as a parent SKU and the color field is not populated. Because each line item in the field spec needs to be its own product, this is an incorrect way of setting up products.

Correct — This example shows the correct way to set up products. The name of the product and the item_group_id fields match (so that the name does not change when variants are selected, but images do). Both of the items below would roll into one “virtual” parent item.

For details about the fields, see Reference.

You can specify variants for a product in the form of a product group. An example of variants is a tee-shirt with 3 sizes (S, M, L) and 4 colors (Red, Yellow, Blue, Green). In this case, we can create a product group (with retailer id as tee-shirt and 12 individual products consisting of the variant options (S+Red, M+Red, L+Red, S+Yellow, M+Yellow, L+Yellow, S+Blue, M+Blue, L+Blue, S+Green, M+Green, L+Green).

Include these columns for the product_group in the product feed. The other required columns are excluded from this example for simplicity’s sake, but you need to specify them in the actual feed file.