How to Use Shopify variants as individual products
If you're using Shopify's default variant setup for products with several visually distinct variants, you're making it harder for your customers and yourself.
Let’s look at Shopify’s standard setup through the lens of a clothing brand and see why it might be better to set up your Shopify variants as individual products.
The problems with Shopify’s default variant setup
You can't show all color variants on the collection page and search
With the default variant setup, a product only shows up once in a collection, no matter how many colors it has as variants. It always gets displayed with its featured image. If a customer is filtering by or searching for a specific color, chances are high that the product gets shown with the wrong image.
"more than half of e-commerce sites (54% to be precise) display their “color” search results in a way that severely impede their users’ ability to both find and decide on a product – with site abandonments as a direct result."
Christian Holst, Research Director
You also can't build and market your collections based on color, like the store does it in the example below.
Product gallery: no clean solution for multiple variant images
In Shopify, you can only upload one image for each variant. But usually there is a set of two to three (or even more) images per color, showing the product from multiple angles or worn by a model.
For a product with lots of colors, that means a cluttered product gallery that confuses customers with dozens of irrelevant images.
Some Shopify themes have built-in workarounds for this exact problem and there is also the famous "alt-text" hack. But both solutions tend to get a mess to handle. They also make for way slower page load times than necessary.
No descriptive variant URLs
If you keep all color variants under one product, Google only gets one product page URL to index. You can't optimise the product descriptions individually. Everything is served under just one URL.
So only one color gets a chance to show up in search.
Your customers might use Google to search the web for a specific color of your product, like 'pink Nike Air Dunk'. Even if your product gets found, it'll be shown with a wrong color on the featured image.
Marketplace shelf space
Some marketplaces don't even support Shopify's variants and when they do, they usually treat them as one product instead of many. That means you lose digital 'shelf space' on those channels.
The fix: variants as individual products
The solution to all the problems listed above is a very simple one: split your single, multi-coloured product into one product for each color, and use the variants just for the product's size.
Now every color has its dedicated product page, its individual URL and product gallery. It appears individually on collection pages and in search results.
This creates a new problem: the product page no longer has the color swatches to switch from variant to variant.
That breaks with existing user expectations and makes it hard for your shoppers to explore your full inventory and find the right color.
Combined Listings: Linking the colors back together
At our boutique agency we used a custom code solution to create custom color swatches for years. That worked quite well, but always added extra friction to the inventory management.
In 2024, Shopify released a new app (and data model) for this use case, called Combined Listings. But that's only available for stores on Shopify Plus.
If you're not on Shopify Plus, you can use the groupmate app.
Like Shopify's Combined Listings app, groupmate lets you organize your now separated products in 'groups', connecting them with color swatches that appear on the product page of every 'member' of the group.
For your customers it feels like real variants, but the swatches link from product page to product page.
The result is a solid setup that
- lets your customers easily switch from color to color
- gives you a dedicated URL for each color variant
- lets you tailor the content on the product page to each variant specifically
Where to split your products
This article used a piece of clothing with 'Color' and 'Size' just as a fitting example. Merchants use Combined Listings for all sorts of products.
For example:
- Cosmetics, where a change in size results in a visually distinct bottle
- Jewelry, when a piece can be from different materials
- Books, when there are a physical and digital versions
A good rule of thumb is splitting the product at that option that makes the product visually distinct.
Or put differently: when the change of an option results in a change of the variant's image.
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