When selling an article, there are usually different sizes, colors or articles that are effectively the same but still differs in a basic property. For example, a t-shirt can come in different sizes such as Large, Medium or Small, and can be in different colors.
In Litium Studio, all article variants are grouped together into a group called a variant group. The articles in a variant group are called variant articles. This section shows how to create variant groups and add articles.
Example
Its easy to explain the concept of variants using a simple example. A book has properties such as Title, Author, Publisher, ISBN, etc. The same book can come in two formats, one is "paperback" which is a low price edition, and one is "hard cover" which is priced more and usually comes with large print as well.
The following image shows a real world example:
There are two articles but the property fields Author and Title have values which are identical.
When selling this book, it will be identified in the market using these two main values - a book called "Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy". In this instance, the main distinguishing properties of the article (Author and Title) is same for two physical "variants".
The merchant might have the two articles above as just two seperate articles, but it will have the drawback of showing the "same article" twice from a practical point of view. Imagine if you get to see the same book twice because one is paperback edition and one is hardcover edition when browsing through the book collection.
So a more selling approach would be to have a single product item with the book title "Anna Karenina" and author "Leo Tolstoy" on the product listings, and then allow the user to select either paperback or hardcover formats when buying.
To do that in Litium Studio, we group these articles together and create a group called "variant group" and then publish the group as one product. When a customer visits this product, the first variant found is displayed, and the customer is allowed to choose between other variants.
Creating a Variant Group
To create a variant group for the above articles, first identify which fields are common in value for the articles that will be in the group. This is done in the Control Panel > Product Catalog > Field Templates. Edit the field template to which the articles belong, and mark the fields that should be variant group fields.
We create a variant group and add the two articles.
The first step is to select which field template the articles is going to use. All articles in the variant group has to be in the same field template.
In step 2, set the name and the variant group properties that will be common to all articles inside this group.
In the next step, you can either create new articles and add to this variant group, or select to include existing articles. A given article can only be included inside one single variant group. Therefore, if an article is already a variant of a variant group, you cannot include the article to be part of another variant group.
Variant groups as products
After you have created a product in an assortment from a variant group, it is possible to select which of the ingoing variants exist as products in the assortment. This means that the same variant group can exist as products in different assortments with different sets of variants.