Options

Learn how the option library supplies starting values for a product's variant options, and what changing an option later does not do.

Options are the named axes a product's variants are built along — Size, Colour, Material.

The Options page at Catalog → Options keeps a library of them. You can import standard sets from Google's product attributes, or define your own.

When you build a product, that library is what the option picker offers. It exists to save you retyping the same values on every product, and that is the whole of its job.

A library you build up

Each option in the library holds:

a display name
a type
a list of suggested values, editable at any time
a count of how many products use it

There are four types:

single choice
multiple choices
free text
colour swatch

Import a standard set, or write your own

Flip on "Browse to add" and you can import from the catalog of standard product attributes, drawn from Google's product attributes.

Use New to define an option from scratch when nothing standard fits.

Most-used first

The option picker on a product lists the options marked as variant options.

It orders them by how often your store already uses them, so the handful you actually work with come first rather than being buried in the standard set you imported.

The chosen options generate the variants

Once a product's options and values are set, the variant grid is generated from them.

Two variants sharing the same combination will block publishing until you fix it, so the values you pick are also what decides whether the product can go live.

An option's values are copied into the product, not shared with it

Picking an option copies its values into the product; nothing points back at the library entry. Editing an option's suggested values later leaves every product already built from it untouched — the library saves retyping, it does not define the catalog.

When to add something to the library

Add an option to the library when you expect to reach for it again. The count of products using each one is a fair guide to whether that guess was right.

Use New for a one-off axis that no standard attribute covers, and do not feel obliged to tidy it into the library afterwards.

Do not edit a library option expecting the change to reach the catalog. It will not, and the products already built from it will keep the values they were given.

The library is a starting point, never a source of truth — the moment an option lands on a product, that product owns its values.

Products

Learn how product options generate the variant grid, what the publish gate requires, and how add-on and related links work.

Inventory

Learn how the reorder forecast and low stock lists work, where the reorder point is set, and what the movements ledger records.