By design, Programa's beta functionality does not allow for product variants. However the good news is this is scheduled for release in late 2020.
How to Optimise Your Products to Allow for Variants
It's free to upload unlimited products to Programa so we recommend taking advantage of this feature by uploading an individual product, for each variant. The more products you have, the more ways people can find your products.
Using the dining chair example, we recommend uploading the first variant (eg black), and then duplicating this product for each individual colour by simply changing the listed colour category and imagery, and saving as a new product.
To duplicate products and create variants:
- Simply open the original product in your Brand Portal
- Click the Duplicate Product button beneath the product name
- This will create a new draft product using the data from the original product, so you only need to change the colour, description and the photos.
- Click save and publish, and you're done!
More Information
To help you understand why we haven't built variants as part of our beta, we'll use the example of a dining chair that comes in 10 different colours.
- Each product colour (variant) should have it's own specific data, such as SKU number, photos, perhaps a different lead time, etc. This data is imported directly into a designer's schedule.
- Users, and especially professional designers, search for specific products for their projects. For example, if a designer is searching specifically for a black dining chair, they should see search results for black dining chairs only, not a a generic product listing.
- With this in mind, a designer should be able to add the specific product they're looking for, into their schedule. For example, if they want the black version of the chair (and all the specific data for the black version) they need to do be able to do that. Rather than adding the generic version of the product.
- There are more than 200 product categories on our platform and it's difficult to correctly build variant functionality without feedback from brands across all categories. For example, the variant requirements of brands selling dining chairs are different to those of someone selling lighting (and so on).
- Over the next few months we'll work with brands to understand the complexity of product variants and build a solution that works for all products, across all categories.