Skip to main content

Options and variants

An option is a way a product varies — Size or Colour, say. Each option carries a set of values — Small, Medium, Large. A variant is one specific combination of values, one per option. A product with no options still has exactly one variant.

Options, values, and the variants they produce​

Combinations of option values are what produce variants — not every possible combination has to exist. When a product is created, the Cartesian product of its options' values is generated as a starting matrix, and any combination can be skipped rather than kept as a variant.

A product can carry up to five options. Publishing to a sales channel supports only three — a product with four or five options is valid in Yessort but can't be published to a channel while it has more than three. Removing an option isn't available from the product page today, so if you might publish this product, avoid adding a fourth or fifth option to it in the first place.

What changes after the product is created​

Once a product exists, its set of options is not entirely fixed:

  • Adding a value to an option that already exists is possible from the product page — each option's row in the Options card has an Add control that opens an inline field for the new value. This is safe on a product with live variants: existing variants are unaffected, and the new value simply becomes available to use.
  • Adding a whole new option — a new dimension the product didn't have before, such as adding Colour to a product that only had Size — is a separate, dedicated flow: see add an option after creation. It back-fills every existing variant with a default value for the new option, and lets you choose which new combinations to actually create.
  • Renaming or removing an existing option or value, and reordering options or values, is not available from the product page today.

A variant's name​

A variant's displayed name is worked out automatically from its option values, joined in the product's option order — "Red / Small", for example. A single-variant product with no options falls back to showing the product's own name.

This auto-generated label can be overridden: the variant's detail sheet has a Title field, which is blank by default. Setting it and saving replaces the auto-generated label with whatever you typed; clearing it back to blank returns the variant to the auto-generated label from its option values.