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Variant Tagger Overview
Variant Tagger Overview

Use the Variant Tagger to tag your products based on the variant options that are in stock

Brad Rees avatar
Written by Brad Rees
Updated over 8 months ago

This app is designed to take most of the work out from being able to filter and create collections for your variant options, such as size and color.

How it works

The app will look at the variant options, and add a tag that takes the format: 'prefix-option' or 'Prefix Option', depending on if you select to use handle-style tags. If you are using the Variant tagger with the Filter Menu, you will need to use handle formatted tags.

Getting started

In the admin, you will want to create a new rule for each type of variant you want to filter on. This means one for size and one for color, for example.

This does not mean one rule for each size (S, M, L, etc.) - do not do this, chaos will ensue.

Options

Title

The title needs to match the title of the variant option, as defined in your product admin.

The highlighted areas need to match the value in the Variant Tagger exactly. So in this case, 'Size' and 'Color'.

Prefix

The prefix is what will be prepended to each tag. When using 'Strict Mode', any tags with this format, but that do not match a variant option will have that tag removed.

For example, for 'Color' as the title, use the prefix 'color', this will then create tags like 'color-red' when using the handle format.

Exclude Sold Out

This will only tag items that are in stock or available for purchase. Once an item goes out of stock it will be untagged. The tags will be added back if the variant comes back into stock again.

This is very important when you want to be able to filter on your variants, but you do not want to show the product when that size or color is no longer available.

Remove tags from items with no matching variant options (Strict Mode)

If the variant does not have a matching option, then any of the tags with that prefix will be removed. Be careful when choosing a prefix, or you could remove a number of your existing tags. Read more on this in the example below.

Use External Inventory Systems

If you are using the Exclude Sold Out option and are not using the built-in inventory management within Shopify then check this.

For example, if you are using Amazon Marketplace as your inventory system in Shopify, and you wish to use the Exclude Sold Out option then this option should also be checked.

Use Handle Format

This will change the format of the tags, such that they work with the Filter Menu. If you are using the Filter Menu ensure this is checked.

The handle format will make everything lower case and convert spaces to dashes. e.g. 'Color Red' becomes 'color-red'.

Filter Menu Group

You can optionally supply a Filter Menu group to automatically populate. This can be a huge time saver when setting up your store. More details are below.

Example setup

A typical example of a setup for filtering by size and color may look like this:

More examples

Product A has a variant with options: Color - Blue that is in stock.

If you create a new rule, enter the title as 'Color'. This must match the options set up in your Shopify admin when creating variants.

Then you need to choose a prefix, such as 'color' or 'Color'. This is the prefix that will be added to all of the variant tags. If you want to include an underscore in the prefix this can be added by setting the prefix as 'Color_'.

Select if you want to use the handle format, if you want to exclude sold-out items and if you want to enable 'Strict Mode', in most cases you won't need to enable this though.

Save the rule.

This will then tag the product with 'color-blue' if using the handle format, or 'Color Blue' if not.

Product A has a new variant added with options: Color - Red with 1 item in stock.

It will be tagged with 'color-red' or 'Color Red' when the store is next processed.

Product A is then sold in red, and if the exclude sold out items is checked, the tag 'color-red' or 'Color Red' is removed.

Product B has a tag 'color-available', and no color options. If 'Strict Mode' is enabled, then this tag will be removed, as it matches the prefix for that rule.


If you have any additional questions, please contact support through the live chat in the app, or at support@powertoolsapp.com

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