Importing Variants (via Excel)

When working with product information in Sales Layer you have the option to create Variants of your Products.

Variants allow you to take similar items, for example a t-shirt that is available in different sizes, fits, or colours, and treat these bits of differing information separately from those which don’t change. This way you avoid repeating this data in multiple places, meaning that if, for example, you wish to change the product’s name, you only need to do it in one place and not for each of the variants. Variants are linked to products using the variant reference field.

Thanks to Sales Layer’s philosophy of keeping things as simple as possible, the Variants option does not appear in the main menu until you start working with them. To do so you have to select the See Variants option from the Actions dropdown menu while viewing your Product. From here you can then import your variants in the same way you did for your products and categories, by copying and pasting the content of an Excel sheet into Sales Layer.

As you can see in the above image, due to their green backgrounds Sales Layer identifies the Product Reference field, for linking variants to products, and the Variant Reference field, for identifying each individual variant, as recognised fields. We are then left with two fields to configure: size and price. As each of our variants will be one size from a specific range, we can set this field to be a List of attributesand then configure it so that multi-selection is not allowed.

To finish, click on Import and your variants will be uploaded to Sales Layer. To see which of your products have variants linked to them you can choose one of the predefined options in the search bar’s dropdown menu: Show items with variants. What’s more, each product thumbnail is now shown with a small icon telling you how many variants each product has. By clicking on this icon you can view them in more detail.

When you are looking at a product’s variants you will not only see all the product information that belongs to that variant, but also the information for each of the other variants from that product. This makes the process of editing variant data much easier.

Warning: Families / forms are applied to products and all their variants but not to the category table. In this way, variants will inherit the family of their parent product and may also have their own fields.