Introduction to Variants

Help your shoppers more easily find products they’ll love by displaying variations across the shopping experience — variations that are most relevant to their current purchase intent.

Athos Commerce's control over how variations of products are displayed creates a unique opportunity to evaluate shopper intent in real-time and then dynamically match it with the most relevant experience to ensure that you’re showing the right product to the right shopper at the right time.

What are variants?

A variant can be thought of as a specific version of a product that possesses unique attributes, features, or specifications that differentiate it from other versions of the same product. Typically, a variant is part of a broader family of related products. For instance, a blue shirt in size small may belong to a broader family of shirts, each with a unique combination of size and color.

Variant search enables merchants to customize the details of individual product variations while presenting the search results in an organized manner to shoppers, giving the impression of a single cohesive product. The best-matching variant is then displayed to the shopper when showcasing the entire product family.

Why do I need variants?

Variant search ensures that only relevant product variations are displayed to shoppers. It also improves relevancy in search and filtering. 

Let's consider an example. A pair of jeans may come in various colors (product parents), and have specific waist and inseam sizes (product children). Each parent product (jean color) may have its own photo to display, and each waist and inseam size combination will have a specific stock level.

When shoppers search for "jeans", they can see all of the product parents — each jean in each color it comes in. But shoppers do not want to see size 30, size 32, and size 34 jeans, when they are looking for size 36. That's where filtering comes in.

Hyper-relevant search & filtering

When filtering on that same search, a shopper will probably want a specific waist and inseam size, and they will expect the parent products to be returned a) in the size specified, and b) in stock. At each level of searching & filtering, shoppers want to see products that match, but they don’t want to see products that don’t contain a variant that fits their size. 

While shopping for jeans, you filter for your size and preferred color. If you click a product you want to buy, only to find it's not actually available in that color in your size, you're likely to leave and find another store with a better shopping experience.

With Athos' variants support, we automatically hide products that aren't actually available in combinations selected by shoppers using filters on search or category pages.

Shoppers expect to see their selections reflected on a high level. For instance, a shopper searching for "polka-dot dress" will automatically show the polka-dot image for each product that has a polka-dot variation. This behavior comes out-of-the-box for Athos once your site has been set up for variant support.

Dynamic display

When shoppers are using filters to find products, they expect to see those versions of the products throughout their shopping experience, while merchants also need a way to optimize which versions of those products they’re highlighting.

Athos balances these needs with dynamic display: Each product’s display on search results or category pages can be determined by variant data such as image, name, price, etc.

Autocomplete

Variant search is bundled into Autocomplete. This means that the dynamic display and faceting functionality will carry over here.