Combined Products Handling
Wade Sonenberg
Overview: Merchants using combined products to bypass Shopify’s 99-variant limit have long faced challenges with merchandising parent/child product relationships. Our latest roadmap enhancements focus on optimizing the handling of parent products based on aggregated data from child variants. Here’s how we’re addressing the issue and what’s coming next for Dynasort.
Problem: The Parent/Child Product Relationship
Current Challenge: Merchants display the parent product on their storefront, but the variants sold are child products. This creates difficulties in accurate merchandising because attributes like sales data, inventory levels, and reviews are tied to the child variants rather than the parent.
Solution Delivered: Our development team has implemented filters that aggregate data from child products and apply it to the parent for more accurate ranking and merchandising decisions. This allows parent products to be merchandised in collections as if they were standalone items with full data visibility.
Phase 1: Introduction of Data Filters for Combined Products (Completed)
Key Features:
- Attribute and Variant Filters: Merchants can now merchandise parent products using data from child variants.
- Aggregated Analytics: Metrics like sales, stock levels, and reviews are calculated across all child variants and applied to the parent.
- Full Compatibility with Shopify Plus: Designed to handle large catalogs, significantly reducing the need for manual merchandising.
Phase 2: Enhanced Automation and Dynamic Ranking (Completed)
Focus Areas:
- Automated Collection Ranking: Dynasort will continuously rank collections based on aggregated child variant data, treating the parent product as a single data object.
- Variant-Level Insights: Merchants will soon have access to deeper insights at the child variant level, informing decisions at the parent product level.
Goal: Automate the entire process of calculating and applying child product data to parent products for more dynamic merchandising, reducing merchant involvement in day-to-day catalog management.
Phase 3: Advanced Analytics and Merchandising Flexibility (In Progress)
What’s Next:
- Customizable Filters: Merchants will be able to apply custom filters for specific product attributes like reviews, ratings, margins, and more.
- Advanced Reporting: Deep-dive analytics will be introduced to track performance at both the parent and child variant level, offering more robust insights.
Objective: To offer merchants even greater flexibility and granularity in their merchandising decisions, allowing for precise control over product ranking and visibility in large catalogs.
What This Means for Merchants
- Time Savings: Dynasort’s automation significantly reduces the man hours required to manually merchandise large catalogs.
- Better Merchandising: Products are ranked based on the full picture—sales, stock levels, reviews, and more—leading to smarter product placements in collections.
- Scalability: This feature set is designed for Shopify Plus merchants with complex catalogs, enabling them to grow without being hindered by Shopify’s 99-variant limitation.
Looking Ahead: Continuing Innovation
Dynasort’s roadmap for handling combined products is designed to meet the evolving needs of large-scale Shopify stores. Stay tuned as we introduce more advanced features that take your merchandising to the next level.
