Product variants are distinct versions of the same product, differentiated by attributes such as size, color, material, or pattern. For instance, a single t-shirt design (the product group) offered in three sizes and five colors results in fifteen unique product variants.
Each product variant has its own unique ID but shares a common product group ID. This structure allows businesses to accurately track and manage the total number of available variations for an individual product.
Product variants are a powerful way for eCommerce businesses to attract more people to their website. This is because selling more than one variation of the same product will appeal to a wider audience.
They are particularly important in the fashion industry because apparel and accessory products are more likely to have multiple variations. You can use them in advertising to appeal to shoppers looking for a specific version of a product, for example red shoes or a yellow raincoat.
Let’s explore what product variants are, examples of product variants and why they are beneficial in eCommerce.
What are product variants?
Product variants are a way to provide consumers with multiple purchasing options for a single product. This means that when shopping online, the same product can be available in various sizes, colors, materials, and price points.
This includes a specific item that is bundled in with related variants to form one distinguishable product. Product variants have unique identifiers, such as price, however, every variant is based on the same product definition.
Using product variants for fashion retailers
For example, a retailer that sells New Balance 2002r sneakers may have tens - or even hundreds - of product variants for this one particular sneaker. If sizes range from 5 to 13, including half sizes, and the retailer sells 5 different colorways, the number of product variants quickly add up.
The following screengrab shows one retailer, Footasylum, with multiple shopping ad listings for the same product due to product variants.
Having so many variations of the same product can very quickly become troublesome to manage. Product feeds become messy, and then retailers run the risk of advertising out of stock variants or not advertising these different variants effectively. The easiest way to manage product variants is with a feed management software like DataFeedWatch. By doing so, retailers in the fashion industry can make sure that they’re making the most of their advertising budget.
Let’s say you own a women's clothing brand and need a reliable way to stay on top of ever-changing inventory levels for size and color. Instead of needing to manually check stock levels of each variant, you can simply set up a rule that pauses and resumes advertising based on the amount of products in stock. Or rather than pausing items based on stock, you can choose to exclude product variants based on other preferences.
You can also make sure that all products are mapped properly so that your blue shoes don’t show up in the search results for someone looking for black shoes.
Other ways fashion retailers can use DataFeedWatch for managing product variants include making sure that the right landing pages are linked for each product variant and easily controlling prices and sales for each variation, and adding your most popular variants to a custom label of “best sellers”.
We’ll get into more in depth details of all the ways you can use product variants in the next two sections.
Products variant examples
Here are some of the more common types of product variant examples that retailers use:
- Size, a common product variant, which can apply to almost all markets whereby there’s more than one size of a product.
- Color, another common product variant that can apply to a wide range of products, from clothing to furniture.
- Material, such as wood, brass, leather, cotton, etc.
- Capacity, for example Tupperware containers that are measured in ounces, or mobile phone storage that could be 16GB, 32GB or 64GB.
- Flavor, this is particularly relevant for the food and beverage sector.
- Style, for example the cut or fit of a pair of jeans, or the finish of a dining table.
- Bundles, which could apply when a product is sold individually or as part of a multipack.
- Customization, which could apply when a product is tailored, such as an engraving.
What product variants can do for you
Here are some tips for using product variants to optimize your product feeds and achieve better PPC results.
Color, size, and gender
How you manage product variants can make or break the success of your PPC ads. What’s the best way to go about this, especially if you are someone who sells apparel and accessories?
By using DataFeedWatch’s native AI feed optimization, you can automatically fill in missing color, gender, and size attributes. By doing this, you’ll have better organized feeds that can out-perform competitors in industries like fashion.
Barcode
Adding the barcode of each product using the product variant increases conversion rates.
Price
The public price on every product variant is computed based on the template price. If you want to charge extra for a specific variation of the product (such as a red colored t-shirt) then that can be computed as an option for every variant.
Inventory
As mentioned before, the product variant is used to manage the inventory. For example, if you are selling t-shirts on your eCommerce website, the inventory managed by the product variant will not display the number of t-shirts that are in stock.
Instead, it will give you numerical data on “T-Shirts, S, Red”, “T-Shirts, M, Blue” and show what is currently available.
Set Availability
When the availability of each product is clearly visible in your data feed, you do not have to waste precious time and advertising budget on products that are out of stock.
Add Product Type
Adding a product type makes it easier for you to bid separately for each product. You do not have to identify the products with general categories provided by Google Shopping. You can use the categories that are more closely linked to the navigation of your website.
Picture
The product variant controls the product picture. Each variation of the product may have its own primary picture. However, this may not be the case if the variations are only based on the size of the product.
For example, the same picture can be used to display a trio of small, medium and large blue t-shirts.
Include Promotions
Adding promotions to your product using product variants is a simple and effective way of drawing attention towards the product.
Tips for luxury retailers in the fashion ecommerce space
Luxury apparel retailers can handle variant-level attributes like fabric type, designer name, and collection season by optimizing their product titles and using custom labels.
How to fix parent-child variant setups in apparel feeds
When talking about product variants, “parent” and “child” refer to the main product and all the variations that stem from it.
Troublesome product variants can be merged in DataFeedWatch to consolidate products with identical attributes into a single product with various options for Facebook and Google Text Ad feeds.
To do this, create a feed that includes the item_group_id, which serves as a common identifier for the related products.
For example, after merging size variants with DataFeedWatch, Bango saw an increased visibility in Google searches and better exposure to their target audience.
Why product variants are useful to an eCommerce business
Product variants can make life easier for eCommerce website owners and entrepreneurs. Here are three important examples:
Increased clicks
People looking for a specific item (such as a red t-shirt) may not find your product in the search results unless you use product variants. This allows you to include the specification (the color red in this case) of the product.
Enhanced user experience
If product variants were not put into effect, then visitors would not be able to click on a product and look through the variants to make a customized purchase.
If visitors are not given the option to choose, then it takes away from the user experience.
Grow sales
By raising visibility, increasing the number of clicks and improving user experience, it’s possible to grow sales.
For example, if consumers search for a specific size or color and you match that with a product variant, it’ll increase the chances of a purchase.
Simplified bill of material
Product variants make it easier for website operators to define a single, simplified bill of material for a product template that includes slight variations for the variants.
Improved pricing system
As previously mentioned, the default price of a product can be computed based on the price of the product template. Additional prices can be displayed depending on the dimension of the variant.
This prevents the pricing system from becoming complex.
Also, it makes it easier for the operators to maintain prices, as there is no need to set an individual price for every variant.
Streamline product variants with PIM software
A product information management (PIM) tool provides retailers with an effective way to manage product data in the required format across multiple sales channels.
As an example, PIM software makes it easier for global businesses to sell in multiple countries by tweaking and refining product data for each market, whether it’s currency or language. It ensures large amounts of data remains accurate and of high quality.
Consider using a PIM platform to improve the management of product variant data. This will help when defining, editing and publishing data because you’ll only need to carry out work once for it to be published across multiple channels, rather than managing sales channels individually.
Why should you pay attention to product variants?
Product variants are beneficial for simplifying the task of managing an eCommerce website. They are great for increasing the number of clicks to the website, for optimizing user experience and improving conversion rate. This makes eCommerce product variants an effective way to grow online sales.
