Inventory variants is an advanced method of configuring a product with attributes. Let’s say you have a mug product that comes in three different colors; red, green and blue. With inventory variants, each possible option for the product is treated as its own individual product record in the store’s database. Because of this, each possible option can have its own price, description, even its own images. Here we are in the Attributes tab inside of the “Edit Products” screen for my mug product. In this video we're going to set up inventory variants for the mug, but before we do that we need to configure an attribute by clicking the “Add Attribute” button. We’ll give it a code of “Color” and a prompt of “Color” and in this example I want to make this attribute a “Swatch.” Lastly, we want to be sure to check mark this “I” check box. “I” stands for Inventory Variants, which is what will be working on in this video. Finally, just hit your “Return” key to save your work.
Now that we have a color attribute, let's give it to some options like red, green and blue. Since this is a swatch attribute, I’m going to upload some swatch images for these different color options. I’ll just select the three colors and click this “Edit” button and in this image column you want to click on the “Upload” button. Here's my red swatch. Here's my blue swatch and here's my green swatch. I’ll select red first and then I'll move on to the green and then finally blue. When you've uploaded your last swatch, click on the “Save” button to save your work. Next, it's time to generate the inventory variant so that each possible option can be treated as its own product record. To do that, we just click on the “Generate variants” button. Once you've generated the variant, you can select each individual option and upload a product image unique for it. Let's select the green option and click on the “Add Images” button. Once we've uploaded the green image, we want to make this the Main image for the green mug option and we'll move on to the blue mug and click on “Add Image” and make this image the main option for the blue mug as well. Now, when we view this product in the store week can cycle through the different color options and the Main product image will update accordingly.