At Genie, we're building a powerful and intuitive platform to simplify inventory management for growing Shopify brands.
Often, ordering new ranges of products or variants in time is tricky. That's why we've built a "New Product" feature, that lets you create and push products to Shopify as Drafts, and then include them in Purchase Orders.
However, we know that brands sometimes only want to create new variants. This is currently not possible in Genie, but there's a very quick workaround - which we'll explain below.
How to Add New Variants to Existing Products?
Here's a short guide on how to add a new variant to an existing product in Genie and Shopify. We'll do this through an example:
A brand wants to add a new, white variant for an existing product, the Adidas Backpack.
In Genie:
Step 1. Go to New Products in Genie.
Step 2. Click on the Create Product button in the top right-hand corner. In this example, we've already started working on a draft so we'll open that straight away.
Step 3. Fill out the relevant details about the product. This should include the Option Titles (e.g. size, color) and the Option Variants for each (e.g. White, Blue, Yellow).
Step 4. Scroll to the bottom of the form, and click Publish to Shopify. This will create the product in Shopify and set its status to Draft.
In Shopify:
After the product is published as a draft, we move to the Shopify platform to locate the original product, Adidas classic backpack, to complete the process of merging the variants in the initial product.
Note: Please only do this once you're ready to go live with the product.
Step 5. Find the original product and the newly created draft in Shopify.
Step 6. Now, in the product list, select both the original product and the new variant and export them as a CSV.
Step 7. Open up the CSV file, and modify the following fields:
Update the handle of the new product to match the original product.
Adjust the title of the new product to match the original product.
Update the SKU to match your original SKU logic, if needed.
Step 8. Then, save the file and get ready to import it again into Shopify.
Step 9. Go back to your Product List in Shopify, and choose Import. When asked, select the option "override products with existing handles" and "unselect "publish new products to all sales channels."
Step 10. Check the confirmation window, and if all looks good, click Import Products.
Annnnd. Pesto! You should have successfully added the new variants to your existing product. You'll now see in this we have 17 in stock for 2 variants.
However, the old product record is still visible in Shopify but is now in Draft. You'll need to go ahead and just delete that - so select it, and then click Delete.
If you open up the product record (in this case "Adidas | Classic Backpack" product), you'll see that the new variant is visible. You can add different images, change the price, etc. as needed.
That's it! For help, feel free to contact us. We're here to ensure your Shopify inventory management is smooth and efficient.