Think of all the different products your company sells. You may sell 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000, or more individual products.

Even though you sell many individual products, you can likely group them together based on shared attributes.

For example, let’s say you had a bike line with five different bikes. They share almost all of the same information, except each bike is a different color.

It would be a tedious and error-prone process to enter the same information for all five bikes.

Instead, you can link products to a parent product, creating variants. Or, you can create solo products.

Create solo products¶

It may be the case that not all of your products can be grouped together based on common attributes. Sometimes you have one-off products. When a product is not a parent or variant, it’s known as a solo product. Solo products are sellable products.

Products are solo products until they’re linked to another product. If another product is linked to a solo product, the solo product becomes the parent product.

You can create a solo product directly in Entries or add a batch of solo products via import. To create a solo product in the app, select Create product, then enter a product name and SKU and select a product type to associate attributes.

After it’s created, add more details about the product, including a featured image, additional attributes, and assets, then link it to a parent product or leave it as a solo.

Learn more in the Find and Edit Product Information video in Acquia Academy.

Link to parent products¶

First off, you may ask yourself, “What’s a parent product?” A parent product is a product with one or more variant products. Parent products are used as a way to organize several related sellable products together, but they’re not sellable products themselves. At the parent level, you’ll store attribute values, like a marketing description, that can be shared with all variants. Attribute values for parents will then cascade down and overwrite values for variants.

Create a parent product by linking a solo product from the product details page. From the product actions, select Link to parent product, and the solo product will become a variant. You can link a maximum of 50 variants to a parent product by default, though you can request to increase this to 100. 

Variant products¶

A variant is a product that’s linked to a parent product. Variants are individual, sellable products, and they're organized with other similar variants as children of a parent product. At the variant level, you’ll store information that’s unique to the product that is not shared with other variants, like sizing and color information. Link activity is displayed in the variant product’s History tab.

A variant is created when you link a solo product to a parent product from the product details page. You’ll know a product is a solo or parent because there will be no variants listed for the product on the Products page.

Unlink variants from parents¶

If a variant no longer needs to be linked to a parent product, from the product details page, select Unlink from parent product. This converts the variant to a solo product. If the product was the only variant of a parent, it will be converted to a solo product.

Unlinking activity displays in the variant product’s history tab.

Import variants¶

With the number of different products your company sells, it can be a tedious and error-prone process to enter the same information for variants. The good news is that you can import that information in the same CSV as a product import to establish parent and variant relationships.

To import variants, add a column titled Parent SKU in the CSV. If a product with a matching parent SKU is found in Entries, the product in the import will be linked to it.

If a product isn’t found in Entries, or if the SKU is for another variant, the product in the import will not be linked to a parent, but the rest of the row will be imported.

To import both parents and variants in the same import, variants must be listed after their parent in the import.

Any linking activity via import will display in the History tab for the variant.

Export variants¶

To ensure that channels have the most up-to-date product information, variants can also be exported via FTP. Each variant will be included in a separate row in the export, and attributes, including those from the parent, will be exported.

Parent products will not be included in separate rows, but from the channel settings, you can select the Parent SKU attribute column (or Include all attributes) and SKUs will display in the export. The SKU of the parent will be indicated for variants, and rows with the same SKU can be used to determine parent and sibling relationships. The field will be blank if the product is a solo product.