One of the things that can be a little confusing in Shopify is understanding the difference between options and variants when entering or editing a product in your store.
To get comfortable working with options and variants, you’ll need to know the specific meaning of each of these terms. You’ll also need to be familiar with the term option values.
The good news is, the terminology is only confusing until you take a few minutes to think through it. After that, it makes a lot of sense and is actually pretty straightforward. I just know it confused me at first so I figure it’s worth writing down how I got my head around it.
Let’s look at a simple example product.
Suppose we are going to sell some socks on our Shopify store. I’m not an expert on sock sizes but let’s just say we’re going to sell these socks in 3 different sizes: Small, Medium, Large.
Then let’s say we’re going to sell these socks in 5 different colors: Black, Brown, Gray, Green, Blue.
In this example, the options are size and color.
The size option has 3 different option values. As we’ve already said those are Small, Medium, Large. The color option has 5 different option values. These are Black, Brown, Gray, Green, Blue.
OK, easy enough. So what are the variants? A variant is basically any combination of the option values listed above that makes a different product. In other words, if we wanted to list out all the variants for the socks we’re talking about, the list would look like this:
- Small Black
- Small Brown
- Small Gray
- Small Green
- Small Blue
- Medium Black
- Medium Brown
- Medium Gray
- Medium Green
- Medium Blue
- Large Black
- Large Brown
- Large Gray
- Large Green
- Large Blue
Each one of those is a variant in Shopify, and the list adds up to 15 variants for the socks we’re selling. As you can see, a quick way to figure out how many variants you have is to multiply the number of option values in one option times the number of option values in the other option. So in this example, we have 5 option values for color and 3 option values for size, which multiplies out to 15 variants.
If you had 3 options, and each option had 3 values, that product would have 27 (3 x 3 x 3) variants. By the way, the maximum number of options you set up for each product is 3.
You can read more about Shopify options and variants on the Variants page of the Shopify Manual/Documentation.
And as usual, the best way to get a grip on how this works is to go into the Shopify admin panel, put in some real products, and start adding your real options and real option values to make some real variants.
