Products

A product in Litestore is one record. It keeps its options and the variants Litestore builds from them. Each variant has its own price and stock. The product also has media, categories and tags, SEO fields, and links to other products.

The options you choose decide which variants exist. A shirt that comes in several sizes and colours therefore stays one product. You don't have to keep several near-identical products in step with each other.

Most of what you set later depends on the options, so choose them carefully first.

Options generate the variants

When you pick the options and their values on a product, Litestore builds the variant grid from them.

If you change the values, Litestore rewrites the grid to match. It writes variants the same way whether you are creating the product or editing it later. An edit therefore can't leave the grid in a state that a new product couldn't reach.

Price and stock per variant

You set these on each variant separately:

• SKU
• stock
• list price
• sale price
• cost

You can also give a sale price an optional start and end date.

If you leave a variant without a list price, Litestore doesn't create a price row for it. Publishing requires a price on every variant, so a variant without a price can only exist on an unpublished product.

What happens at zero

You choose what happens at zero stock for each variant, not for the whole product.

You can turn stock tracking off for that variant entirely.

If you leave tracking on, you choose what a sold-out variant does:

• block add-to-cart and checkout
• stay buyable as a back-order and ship on restock

Before you can publish

A product has one of three statuses:

Draft
Published
Archived

You can't schedule a product to publish later. Litestore only lets you move a product to Published when it meets five rules:

1. It has a category.
2. It has at least one image.
3. It has at least one variant.
4. No two variants share the same option combination.
5. Every variant has a price.

The checklist on the product page uses these same rules. It can't show the product as complete while publishing is still blocked.

Renaming a product

When you rename a product, Litestore keeps the old slugs and redirects them to the current one.

Links that customers have already saved or shared keep working after a rename.

Two kinds of link between products

An add-on is a paid product you offer alongside this one, such as installation, insurance or gift wrap. It has its own price, goes into the cart as its own line, and ships as its own line.

A related link only changes what the customer sees. The label you give it says what it means, for example "Wear it with" or "In this kit".

You can add either kind in three ways:

• by hand
• generated with AI
• from customer activity

Litestore has no separate cross-sell or upsell type. The labelled related link replaced them.

Media

You can add media to the product and to each variant. A colour that looks very different from the others can have its own photographs.

The records behind a product

In the database, a product is stored as four kinds of record. These hold the product with its options, the variants, each variant's price row, and the links to other products:

Product
ProductVariant
VariantPrice
ProductRelationship

Building a product

1. Create the product. Choose its options and their values.
2. Open the variants table. Set the SKU, price and stock on each row.
3. Fill in the rest. Add media, a category, tags, SEO fields and product links. Publish once the product meets the five rules.

When you add links, choose the kind based on whether the customer pays for the second product. How it looks on the page doesn't decide it.

Use an add-on when the customer actually buys the second product. It needs its own price, its own line in the cart, and its own shipment.

Use a related link when you only want to point the customer to something. The label tells them why.

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