Skip to main content

Configurable products

Finding the right product should be as easy and pleasant as possible. To that end, your products should contain as much information as possible - think of ranges of sizes and/or colors for example.

Now, all these SKUs can be added individually, but generally we advise setting up a product hierarchy using parent and child products. This kind of structure greatly improves the searchability of your products.

To stick with the example: this way customers on your website will be able to navigate to a style of t-shirt, followed by the choice between colors and finally ending with a specific size.

Inserting hierarchy​

Let's say we've got this shirt that comes in red, blue, and black, and each of those come in a variety of sizes. We will set this up as follows:

  • Parent product
  • Child product (variation of the parent)
  • Grandchild products (variation of the children)


Parent product​

We will start with a product in its most basic form, say: v-neck t-shirt. It can be any kind of product, but any property that defines variety is left out. After this, we add variations.

Child product​

The shirt comes in three colors: red, black and blue. We now add three child products:

  1. Red shirt
  2. Black shirt
  3. Blue shirt

The v-neck t-shirt product is the parent product to those variations.

Grandchild products​

Lastly, we configure sizes underneath all those color variations in the exact same way as we did before.

Since those are the lowest child products in the hierarchy, these are the actual sellable products/SKUs. Again, the parenting is merely for the sake of having a structured approach.

Using this method, users can search for v-neck t-shirt rather than Blue v-neck t-shirt XL, then further choose the desired variation from the Parent product.

EVA-user benefits to hierarchy

Aside from making it easy for your customers, there are benefits to App and Admin Suite users as well.

  • In POS and mobile Apps, employees can easily navigate to a certain style of product and see in which colors it's available ("What other colors does this T-shirt come in?").
  • Similarly, employees can quickly see all sizes a product comes in, helping them to quickly gauge stock levels or initiate an Endless Aisle sale for items out of stock.
  • EVA’s Pricelist and Promotions features allow users to configure prices and discounts on a higher level, with EVA ensuring the prices or promotions apply on the underlying products. This can greatly simplify configuration or streamline the size of your API requests.