Product Variants

The way Pakk deals with product variants might be different from what you are used to.

The way Pakk deals with product variants might be different from what you are used to. Rather than setting up a “mother” or “master” product and having variants of it, in Pakk you just create a normal product for each variant.

Let’s say you sell dustbins in various colours and sizes. You will create independent product records for each of the combinations of size and colour. So, for example “Green 240 Litre Bin” would be one product and “Red 360 Litre Bin” would be another, separate product.

Motivation

Although this is a tutorial, not a history of Pakk development, let’s just make a short diversion to explore why Pakk implements variants in this way. In other e-commerce platforms, to create product variants you normally set up some sort of “master” product record and then try to specify the axes on which it can vary. There then might be more or less control over what you can do with the “variants”. But in Pakk, all variants are just normal products, so you can do whatever you need to with variants, including full control over attributes, pricing, stock levels and display and categorisation. Although you pay a small penalty in ease of maintenance, we believe the flexibility that this approach affords is more than worth it.

So, if a product variant is just a product, at what point does it become a variant? The answer is at the point of display.

Product variant groups are used in your websites to bring together products that you want to be displayed as co-variants - for example, sizes of shoes or colour of bins.