Catalogue Setup: Single Product with Variants or Multiple Products

Read about Nyla's Related Product Options feature, and the pros and cons of setting up your Shopify catalogue in this way.

The standard, best practice, way to set up products in Shopify is to create a single listing for each product containing all the product's variants. However, some merchants choose to split out some variations of products into different product listings for different reasons.

For customers who want to do so, Nyla’s “related product options” feature enables you to link different, related, product pages together by one option (e.g colour, material and so on). However, this approach does have drawbacks and complexity involved, and goes against best practices in most cases.  

This article summarizes some of the pros and cons of each approach, and explains how the Related product options feature in Nyla works: 

• Single product setup (best practice)
• Splitting variants into multiple products
• Related product options feature 

Single product with all variants vs Multiple products: Pros & Cons

Single Product with all variants

Generally speaking, for most brands, it is best practice to set your products up as single products that contains all of that product's variants in Shopify. This results in a more condensed customer experience, and reduces the workload of managing your product catalogue. See here for studies by the Baymard institute containing data to suggest that having single products that contain all variants results in a better customer experience: 

• https://baymard.com/blog/dtc-benchmark#dtc-product-lists
• https://baymard.com/blog/combine-variations-one-list-item

The benefits to having your catalogue setup this way include: 

• Easier catalogue management in Shopify: you don’t need to create duplicate versions of multiple products
• Easier discoverability via more condensed PLPs (all colour options / option values can be accessed from one grid item)
• Features like quick add, filtering and bundles work in a more compatible way
• Easier content management in Nyla: you only need to manage one page per product

In general - this way of setting up your catalogue plays into the way that Shopify is designed, is easier to manage, is more compatible with ecommerce features and there is data to suggest that is also a better experience for customers. 

Multiple Products for different option values

However, some brands decide to accept the increased lift given the needs of their specific customers, or having seen that having more products on display in grids works better for them. 

The benefits to having multiple products for different option values include: 

• More merchandising flexibility: having one grid item per colour for example can enable you to split colours into different collections and so on. 
• If you have over 100 variants of a product: Shopify currently limits you to 100 variants for each product. So for some brands who have a large array of colours for one specific product, the only option is to split them into multiple versions. Note: they announced this limit would be increased to 2000, however at the time of writing this is not yet available publicly for customers. 
• Some brands / SEO experts have claimed SEO benefits if your customers tend to search by the factor that splits out products, for example “red shoes”. However other SEO experts do note that there are SEO benefits in combining your variants onto one page, and this can differ from brand to brand. 

This list isn’t exhaustive. For some brands, taking a more editorial approach for different colours or styles of one product can prove beneficial. 

However, there are many tradeoffs that come with this approach. Some of the tradeoffs include: 

• Far higher catalogue proliferation, which comes with an associated higher cost and effort to maintain
• Issues with compatibility for features like Quick Add, Bundling. 
• Not being able to access all colours of a product within one grid item
• Proliferation of pages, which can require additional content and management etc, for example needing to set canonical SEO for all related pages
• Higher setup costs and effort, e.g Nyla’s related product options feature requires you to create a collection for all linked products 
• More complex analytics given that products are split into different PDPs

This list is not exhaustive, for example there can be other considerations with 3P apps and so on. 

Generally speaking, it is best to keep your catalogue in a more condensed form with one product and multiple variants unless you have data to prove otherwise for your brand. 

Related Product Options

If, despite the additional lift and UX tradeoffs, splitting your products by colourway or another option type is right for your brand, Nyla’s “related product options” feature enables you to do so. 

The requirements to use this feature are that: 

• You only link by one option 
• For the option that is linked (e.g colour), you have one option value per product. 
  • For example, you link the following products by colour: 
    • Blue Shoe - only colour blue, multiple sizes
    • Red Shoe -  only colour red, multiple sizes
    • Black Shoe - only colour black, multiple sizes
  • You can not link multiple products by colour if they have multiple colour values. 
• You must have the specific option value set up in Shopify (e.g to link by colour, you need to have the colour option added, with one value). 
• You need to create a collection for every list of products that you want to be related
• You then need to add the relevant collection as an override on your PDP template for each product you want to be linked

Here's a screen recording of how this is set up: