Selling items with many colours

[StephenClose]

Hi, I am setting up a new site to sell embroidery threads, which are available in over 200 colours.

Is it preferable to use variations for the different colours or the same thread type (item), or should I create distinct items for each colour?

Customers are free to order one or more threads of any colour, and multiple colours in one order.

When any colour is sold out, I will hide that one on the site

[tonydow]

I think having distinct items for each colour would be preferable as choosing something like threads is a very visual    thing. You could set them up as zero cost and have a mandatory modifier listing the thread types with respective costs.  Example 

[Emma_]

Hi @StephenClose, welcome to the Seller Community!  As per @tonydow suggestion, you can create an item per colour and add the thread types as modifiers. 

Adding colour options may not be the most suitable option because you have 200 colours and it can make it difficult to browse for your customers. 

Please let me know if you have any other questions. 

[StephenClose]

Thank you Emma. I will set up each thread type with separate items for each of the colours. I have tried to create duplicate copy items, but the original item weight is not copied, and I also have difficulties changing the image of the copy item. Are these known problems?

[k_atie]

Hey @StephenClose, just stepping in for Emma here. I agree with both Emma and @tonydow, I think the best option here would be to create an item per color and then add the thread type as modifiers. This will simplify your customer's buyer experience when browsing your website. 

I just tried to duplicate an item from my own dashboard and the images, along with the variations and modifiers were all copied over the new item. If possible would be able to take a screenshot of the duplicated item and which pieces of information were not duplicated? This might help us diagnose the issue. 

[StephenClose]

@k_atieWhen I copied an Item (with no variation nor modifier), the original item image was used for the copy item. Can I remove this image from the copy, without also removing it from the original item? (a warning message indicated the image would be removed from the library).

The copy item did not appear to have the weight of the original item (0.002kg).

[StephenClose]

Thank you tonydow. I agree it may be best to have separate items for each colour in a thread type. The different ranges have their own colours, so your suggestion of modifiers may not work for me.

[tonydow]

I may not have explained very well but I suggest having each colour as a separate item and the thread types as modifiers. If you look at this example link I have each colourway as the main item and the yarn blend as the modifiers which I thinks is similar to how you could do it.

[StephenClose]

I can see how you work with your example, but I have distinct shade names for each of the thread types.

My customers pick a thread type and then choose the shade(s) they want.

I was looking for the best way to present 200+ shades for that thread. I think my best option is to build these as separate items.

[tonydow]

Hi Stephen. My apologies for misunderstanding your process. As you have explained it, I can’t think of an easy way to accomplish this with having the thread type as the first option with so many colour options. I would be interested to see how you solve the problem. Regards, Tony 

[amjessey]

Hi @StephenClose 

I know you have begun setting up your products online to show each colourway of a thread as a separate item, however, here’s my view based on our experience of dealing with products with high numbers of variations. 

We sell made-to-measure suits and other men's clothing, and we have around 3000 fabrics to show our customers which they select before we make their suits. The fabrics are presented in bunches with around 50 fabrics per bunch. Whilst we don’t sell fabrics per se, our customers browse the fabrics on our website so the principle is the same. We have decided to not show all our fabrics online as we know which are the most popular ones so show a curation instead. We can do this because we meet all our made-to-measure customers in person during the sales process and this is an opportunity to show them the less popular fabrics which are not shown online, if relevant to them.

Identifying the easiest and most efficient way for customers to browse, navigate and add to their cart the products you are showing them (in your case threads) means considering how Item Variations and Item Modifiers affect not only the product pages but also category pages and other things like stock taking and marketing. Question - are you selling only threads or do you sell other products too, e.g. needles, chalk and fabrics?

Without knowing more about your business, it’s difficult to be sure what is best but for us, with our fabrics being literally bound together in a presentation bunch and each bunch with its own unique characteristics, it seemed the logical choice to reflect that on our website. When it comes to marketing we talk about the bunch of fabrics as much as we do the individual fabrics so it helps to show them grouped together on a single product page to reflect the physical bunch. This may not be a priority for your business but for us, it has been. For your products, if the threads can be grouped by unique characteristics, e.g. a thread might be heavy gauge cotton that is good for outerwear, however, that thread comes in 200 different colours, I would consider making each thread type (item) a distinct item on your website, with the colourway being the variation of each item type.

Regarding page layout, if the design of Square Online product pages does not do well at displaying 200 item variations, then you could use Item Modifiers instead of Item Options (Variations) when creating the product in Square, as @tonydow has suggested. From what I can see, if going down the item variation route Square shows colour thumbnails on the product webpage for the various colour variations of an Item and I anticipate this would be impractical when there are such large numbers of variations. Is there an option for a drop-down menu instead of thumbnails, @Emma_ ?  Even if there is, this might still be problematic as the drop-down menu would be 200 rows deep. I would need to look at Square Online in more detail, however, I would be interested in knowing if images on the product page of each colourway (item variation) can link to the drop-down menu/ thumbnails. What this means is that if a customer clicks on an image (of an item variation) this selects the corresponding drop-down menu row/ thumbnail so they do not have to manually find it in the drop-down menu/ thumbnails. @Emma_ , is this functionality available?

Regarding Item Modifiers, as far as I know, it’s not a way of keeping a record of inventory so you would not have a way of tracking your remaining inventory of any of your threads within Square. This means you would have to do this by the sight of your physical inventory in your warehouse and delete or disable/hide that specific Item Modifier value of the particular colourway when it's sold out.

Regarding browsing and navigating the product category, and website as a whole, if you only have a small number of items on your website with large numbers of variations you may find the category pages are looking meagre so consider this carefully when deciding how to group and display variations of an item.

I hope that is helpful information regarding some of the technical aspects. Let me know if you have any questions. 

Thank you.

[StephenClose]

@amjesseyThank you for your detailed reply. We sell our own embroidery designs with the canvas and packs of threads.

We also retail the threads individually, for customers to use on their own projects. There are about 12 different manufacturers for these threads, some of which have over 20 different ranges. Some of these thread ranges have 200+ different colours.

Ideally I would like to have a page with compact rows for each colour, with images 50 pixels high. These could be added individually to the cart, either with a single button to add the quantity of threads chosen, or if these are added individually, the view should bounce back from the cart to the previous page, to allow the customer to select their next colour.

@k_atie @Emma_ Is there a way to display items in compact rows in Square Online?

[k_atie]

Hey @StephenClose, thank you for the explanation. 

To answer your question in the previous post, you should be able to delete the image of the duplicate item and change it to the other one without deleting the image of the original item, as even duplicate items are considered to be completely separate items. To delete the image:

1. Go into the item whose image you'd like to remove
2. In the edit item menu, click edit on the image box
3. Click on the red X on the top right-hand corner of the screen. This will delete the image. 

As for the weight, that's odd. Was the weight under as a custom attribute? I just tested it on my own account and when I duplicated an item, the weight was duplicated as well. Are you able to prove some screenshots of what you are seeing? 

As for changing how your items are displayed on Square Online, there isn't a way to change this unfortunately unless you are switching between the two templates. We have a Shop All Template and Order Online (Restaurant features). To switch template:

1. In your Square Online site editor, select the Page dropdown menu.
2. Under Order Online, select “…“ > Switch template.
3. Choose Shop All or Order Online and select Switch.
4. Finish setting up your page and Publish your site to see the changes live.

I can definitely see why that feature would be useful for you though! I'll pass your feedback on to our team who will take it into their consideration. 

Let me know if you need help with anything else!

[StephenClose]

@k_atieI have changed the images now, thank you.

The shipping weight is still giving me problems on all of the Items. I set the shipping weight as 0.002kg, save the changes, then open the item again and note the weight is now zero. If I try to save the item again I have the warning on the shipping weight "This field must be greater than zero". Is there a minimum weight parameter?

[tonydow]

Hi Stephen. Are you duplicating the item in Online / Items / Site Items. I have just tried that and everything copied including the weight. The only difference was that it was shown as Unavailable rather than Visible. I don’t think there is any minimum weight as i’v found it can be left blank.

[k_atie]

Thanks for clarifying @StephenClose. I've just tested out what you've described and can confirm that I was able to replicate the issue. I've gone ahead and escalated this to our team to double-check if this is expected behavior. I'll get back to you as soon as I have an update!

[k_atie]

Hey @StephenClose, thank you for your patience while I waited for a reply from our team.

So it seems not being able to add 0.002 as a weight measurement is a limitation within our system. We only allow weights to two decimal figures, e.g. 0.00, hence why it defaulted back to 0 when inputting it on your Square Online dashboard. 

We'll pass that on to our team as feedback for them to take into consideration for product improvement

[StephenClose]

@k_atieThank you for checking this and confirming the limitation. As a workaround, I will multiply all the individual item weights by 10 and adjust my shipping rate tables to match this. Can you please let me know if and when this is fixed, as I am still building my site. I expect to have about 4,500 items in total.

Is it possible to change the weight of items using the bulk editing tool, or can I include the weight tag when exporting my site to a catalogue Excel spreadsheet for off-line editing and importing?

[k_atie]

Hey @StephenClose, no worries! And thank you for sharing your workaround, I'm sure other sellers will benefit from it. 😊

At the moment, Square Online doesn't facilitate bulk editing item weight. Additionally, our import/export tool does not require wight to be attributed to your items, so adding a column to the file that you'll be importing runs the risk of corrupting the CSV or Excel file, resulting in your items not importing properly. So this would be considered to be another feature request. Sorry about that!

I agree that it would be a very convenient feature to have, though. Our product team will be happy to take your feedback on board! 

Let me know if you need help with anything else!

[tonydow]

“import/export tool does require wight to be attributed to your items”

Did you mean “does NOT require weight…….”

[k_atie]

Thanks for the correction @tonydow, I've edited the text so that the post contains the correct information.