Variants and options
Variants are the specific versions of a product that a customer chooses between, for example Color: Blue / Size: L. You build them in the Options & Variants section of the product editor.
Before you start
- Option types such as Color, Size or Material, and their values, are defined in Settings → Variant Options. Each option type also has a display style (Dropdown, Swatch, Radio Buttons or Rectangle List), and each value can have a SKU suffix and a swatch.
- The product must be saved once. Options & Variants opens after the product has been created.
- Give the product a SKU first. Variant SKUs are built from it.
Build your variants
- Open the product and go to Options & Variants.
- Under Assign Options, tick the option types that apply to this product, then choose the values for each.
- Click Generate Variants. Fulify creates every combination of the values you chose.
- Fill in the details for each variant row.
- Click Save in the save bar. Variants save together with the rest of the product.
Each generated variant gets a SKU made from the product SKU plus each value's SKU suffix, for example TEE-RED-S. If a value has no suffix, Fulify uses the first six letters and numbers of its name in capitals.
If your choices would create more than 100 variants, Fulify warns you. BigCommerce allows up to 600 variants per product, but a long list is hard to manage, so consider trimming your option values.
Adding values later
You can press Generate Variants again at any time, for example after adding a new size:
- Variants that already exist keep their SKU, prices, weights, barcodes, images and everything else.
- Only the new combinations are added as new rows.
- Rows for combinations you've unticked are removed.
This means a SKU that's already live on a channel or in your warehouse system won't change by accident.
The variant SKU separator
By default, generated SKUs join their parts with a hyphen (TEE-RED-S). If your SKUs already use hyphens, you can switch to a tilde (TEE~RED~S) in Settings → Variant Options, under Variant SKUs.
The separator is used when you press Generate Variants. Existing variant SKUs aren't changed.
Variant fields
Each variant row shows the option values plus:
- SKU
- Price
- Cost
- Active
- Default: optionally mark one variant as the default.
Click Show under More fields to open the rest:
- Identifiers: UPC, MPN, GTIN, Bin Picking Number, HS Code, Country of Origin and Tax Code.
- Inventory: Warning Level (a low-stock threshold), Disable purchasing and a Disabled Message. These appear when the product is set to Track by variant.
- Shipping: Weight, Width, Height, Depth, Free shipping and Fixed Shipping Price.
- Pricing (extra): Retail Price, Sale Price and Unit Pricing.
- Variant Images: a main image and additional images, each with alt text.
There's no stock quantity field. Fulify doesn't hold stock; your warehouse or order system sends quantities to your channels.
Values that come from the product
Leave a variant field blank and it uses the product's value. The blank field shows what it will inherit, marked "from product", so you can see exactly what each variant will get. Fill a field in only where a variant differs.
Choose the right stock tracking level
Fulify doesn't send stock, but it does send the product's Inventory Tracking setting, and that decides whether your channel uses the stock your warehouse system reports for each variant. Get it wrong and, for example, sold-out sizes can stay on sale.
Fulify checks the setting against the product's variants and warns you in the Inventory & Stock section when they don't match:
| The product | Tracking set to | What Fulify suggests |
|---|---|---|
| Has variants | Track by product | Switch to Track by variant |
| Has variants | Don't track inventory | Switch to Track by variant |
| Has no variants | Track by variant | Switch to Track by product |
Click Switch to Track by in the warning to change it in one step, then save and sync. The warning is advice only: tracking a variant product at product level is sometimes deliberate, when all variants share one pool of stock.
A variant counts as a real variant if it has option values, or if it has its own SKU that's different from the product's. If a variant has neither options nor a SKU, Fulify tells you that stock can't be matched to it.
To find every product with a mismatch, use the Inventory filter on the Products list and choose Doesn't Match Variants.
Per-channel variant overrides
On a product's channel tab, the Options & Variants section shows that channel's variants, so you can override a variant's SKU, price or other values for one store only. See How channels work.
External variant groups
To present separate products as variants of each other, each with its own page and URL, use External Variant Groups. See External variant groups.