Many stores use a single, shared product profile for multiple types of products. This is convenient, but it has a downside: all products in the profile are assigned all of the profile’s variants. If you sell coffee beans, tea, and capsules under the same profile, your capsules will end up with a 1 kg variant, and your coffee beans with a 30-count variant. With active variants, you decide which variants belong to each individual product.
Pure product feeds without variants for 0 DKK
In your product feeds, each variant is sent as a separate product. If you also include sold-out items, or if the product is allowed to be sold out of stock, the empty variants will be included. If the variants use variant prices, a variant without a variant price will be listed at 0 kr. Google rejects these types of products, and you’ll end up with a long list of items marked as “Not approved.”
When you disable the redundant variants, they’ll be omitted from your feeds to Google Shopping (including Google’s country and language feeds), Pricerunner, Partner Ads, and Miinto, as well as from any feeds you create yourself. The feed contains only the variants you actually sell, and your ad spend goes toward the products you have in stock.
A variant selector customers can trust
Inactive variants aren’t displayed when customers select variants in Shoporama’s default themes. Your customers no longer have to click through sizes that don’t exist or wonder why a tea bag can be purchased as “10 pcs.” This makes it faster and more reliable to select and add the item to the cart.
Bulk editing of variants from the product overview
You can select active variants directly on the individual product page. But if you have many products in a broad product line, it’s much faster to do so from the product overview. Filter by product line, select the products, and choose Active Variants under More Actions.
On the Active Variants page, you’ll see all the selected products together, with each variant as a button that you can turn on or off with a single click. A green dot indicates which variants are already in use because they have a variant price, inventory movements, or an item number/GTIN.
Clean up with one click: “Only Active” for All
With “Only active on all,” you keep the variants marked with a green dot on all products in a card and turn off the rest. Products without active variants will not be changed. You can also enable or disable a specific value for all products using “Enable for All ” and “Disable for All.” Nothing is saved until you click “Save,” so you can safely experiment and review the rows first.
Nothing is lost: price, inventory, and item number are preserved
When you disable a variant, it is not deleted. The variant’s price, stock, and SKU/GTIN are saved, so you can reactivate the variant whenever you need it. This makes active variants an easier alternative to splitting the profile, where you’d have to set the price, stock, and SKU again for all variants.
Here’s how it works
- If you haven’t selected anything, all variants in the profile are active, just as you’re used to.
- If you select a subset, it applies only to that specific product. Other products in the same profile are not affected.
- There must always be at least one active variant for a product.
- Your feeds will be updated automatically for the products you’ve changed. It may take up to a few hours for the change to appear in all feeds.
Read the step-by-step guide in the article Active Variants: Choose Which Variants Each Product Uses.