Creating Variable Products

What is a Variable Product?

Variable Products are used in cases where you wish to provide the user options during their purchase that will have an effect on the end product that user receives.

These options can be presented as a drop-down list, typically used to show the customer sizing options or additional personalization options for a product. Once these options are added as a variable product, we will be able to set individual pricing for each product variation, as well as keep inventory for each individual variation as well.

Set the Product Type

After creating a new product, click the product and enter the product edit screen. Near the top of the screen, you will see a dropdown called ‘Product Type’, you want to click this and select “Variable Product”.

After doing so, you will notice the price field has disappeared, no worries though, we will get it back once we tell the computer how many variations of our product exist.

Create the Attribute

Scroll down the product edit screen until you see the section titled “Attributes and Variations”. You want to click the button to add a new Attribute.

Then, you want to enter a name that describes what the options are related to. For example, if we are entering variations of a product based on it’s color, we want to enter the Attribute Name “Color”, into this field.

On the right-hand side of this field you will notice that you can enter a list of Options for this attribute. You can do so by listing your set of options for this attribute, with each option being separated by a “|” symbol.

In the case of our color example, our list of options may look like this: “Red | Blue | Green”.

Create the Variations

After you have created your attribute, you want to select, “Create Variation From All Attributes”. This will create a sub product for each of the three types of product you’ve created.

You want to click the dropdown for these products in order to expand them, then you can enter your pricing info and your inventory levels for each variation into their respective fields. You can also add an image of how the product with this attribute would look, which allows the customer to see the option visually as they are shopping.

Be sure to click the Save Variations button below these sub products before exiting.

If you don’t do this, the product will show as ‘Out of Sto