Should you show products as variants or individual SKUs on your collection pages?
It depends, mainly on the breadth of your catalog.
If you run a specialized store where you excel at a particular USP and offer fewer products with greater depth in your domain, your catalog likely isn't very broad.
In this situation, you might hesitate to show a consolidated view of your products on collection pages to avoid making customers feel your store lacks variety and to make your inventory appear "full." As a result, many store owners create individual SKUs for each product variation rather than creating a single parent SKU with variants. While this seems intuitive, it's often unwise and may cause problems later.
Why, you ask?
There are several reasons.
A. First is appearance.
Your store may look cluttered. Imagine seeing row after row of the same product in different colors (or sizes, or other attributes). For apparel sellers especially, product photos often look nearly identical with models posing the same way in each variation. This can cause visitors to lose interest while scrolling since they're not seeing truly different products.
B. Second is data hygiene.
This isn't the cleanest way to organize your catalog. It's a short-term solution that works until you start operating at scale.
If your business grows—as you hope it will—this "hack" will begin affecting your downstream operations. Your analytics won't provide quality data. You may struggle syncing with marketplaces. While these issues might be manageable when you're small, once you reach a certain size, consolidating your inventory into variants becomes extremely difficult because many third-party integrations will be affected.
C. Third, you'll struggle to show variations on product detail pages. If a customer is viewing a red T-shirt, you'd want to display other colors as swatches right there, allowing them to toggle through options. With separate SKUs, you'll need custom code to accomplish this.
Despite these drawbacks, some brands still choose to keep separate SKUs.
Here's a solution for the third problem: Create custom meta fields to establish relationships between various SKUs and display them as variation swatches on your product detail page.
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