Don’t expect a smooth transition from Magento to Shopify

Causes: One of the regular Shopify troubleshooting questions people ask is ‘How to migrate products with multiple variants?’ or ‘Will adding more variants of a product to an existing shop cause disorganization? The issue is that many new Shopify users don’t know how to work around ‘Shopify product variants’. If Magento supported product variation addition without a specific limit, Shopify keeps a limit of 100.

Solutions: For a given product, there can be variations such as sizes, types, materials, or colors. For example, a shopper searching online for a Tee Shirt would want to purchase a single item with different colors or sizes (*if available). But the million-dollar question asked by the new Shopify store owner is ‘how to split the variants and manage them on the Shopify platform?

With Shopify:

• You can add only up to 100 variants of a product.
• You can convert each variant into a new product.
• You have to add the product that you want to split to the import list, then select a split product from the ‘more action’ option on the Shopify platform and split in a way that you need. The split can be based on color or size or some other attributes.

Experts adopt many techniques to avoid the Shopify product variation limits. But one of the top tactics is to consider converting one of the dimensions (size/ color, etc.) into a product instead of a variant. Then links are added to this new formed product indicating that it is a part of a category of a product.

For instance, you want to sell jeans with 100 plus variants and your Shopify limit is restricting you to add a new Jeans color variation, say ‘Blue faded’. What you can do is to treat the ‘blue faded’ as a new product and links of the jeans range under which it falls can be added to it.

The second most effective way is to use the external to Shopify-recognized apps. One such app is called as ‘Bold’, what this does is to edit theme data and add as many as variants to the existing product data. But one has to research thoroughly to understand if the app will work perfectly for a specific range of products or services, because there are chances that the merchants use the external app to see the complete collapse of other integrated apps and solutions.

And if you are a top retailer with 1000s of variations and product ranges, the only way to provide the customers with the right shopping experience is to rely on a VL OMNI. This is a top data integration app based on iPaaS solution. VL OMNI incorporates various tags and front-end fixes to handle high volume data with ease.

(Be Cautious: If product variations are not charted well, the sales conversions may not happen as per the calculations. A study by Conversion pointed out that only 8% of the page traffic actually converts. The percentage goes down even further, if a product page confuses a shopper.)