Any Way or Workaround to Breakout Item Variations Into Distinct Items Or Show As Separates Online

[326Hall]

Hi there! So we have been using Square for Retail in our brick and mortar stores for a few years now and have been pleased with it. We are branching out into the online portion and currently working on building out a storefront. The issue we are running into is that when we initially setup our items in POS we used variations for a lot of them in a broader context. An example would be if we had a vendor that sold animal plushies it would be entered into the system as Vendor Animal Plushies and within that item we do a variation of say, Cat, Dog, Alligator, Shark, etc. Some of these have upwards of 50 or 60 variations. It doesn't matter so much in Retail brick and mortar settings because it rings up fine and they can see them all individually on the shelf that way, but online it will only show as a single item and within that item the shopper has to click on each thumbnail variation to see the separate options vs. having a way to make that one item's variations to show up as separate individual items on the webpage. Does anyone know if there is an easy work around to either get these to show as distinct items just for online or convert them to individual items without having to delete all of the variations and manually enter them back in as new items? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[HC_Charlie]

thanks for your post @326Hall , I've had the same experience last year when I started to setup my online site. I didn't have as many variations as you have, but I found it difficult to deal with how the online shop shows variations. I don't think there is any way to auto change this...I had to recreate the items separately so I could add them into my online store and display how I wanted them to look.

Maybe someone has had a more recent experience or fix with this issue and will post here. Wish I had a better answer for you on this.

[RobynR]

@326Hall, I want to ensure I fully understand what you are asking, so I can provide you with the most accurate information. 

Are you looking to find out how to showcase images for variations on your Square Online site?

[326Hall]

No not exactly, we can showcase the images within the single item, but we were wanting to see if there was a way to take variations themselves and make them appear as individual items in the store itself on the item category pages. For instance in the attached photo below these are all variations within one item, but make them appear as separate individual items in the online store that when shoppers are browsing they can see all the different color options as separate items on the item page versus just one item on the page and they have to click it and then they can see all the color options. Our concern is if the initial photo doesn't draw them into the item product page they may not realize there are different designs for it to choose from if that makes sense than just the one option shown.

[326Hall]

Appreciate you taking the time to answer and give me your experience. That may be what we have to end up doing as well. Thanks again!