Product variants: managing sizes, colours and packaging in a PIM

Sizes, colours, packaging, strengths — product variants are one of the most complex aspects of catalogue management. A data model that is poorly designed from the outset leads to errors, duplicates and unusable exports. Here’s how ProductsManager organises variants for retailers.

The problem with variants without a PIM

Without a clear structure, variants create two opposing problems for retailers:

• Catalogue explosion— every combination (red T-shirt XL, red T-shirt L, blue T-shirt XL…) becomes a separate record, with no links between them. The result : thousands of duplicate records with the same descriptions and the same images.
• Loss of information— conversely, everything is grouped into a single listing with a generic description that makes it impossible to distinguish between variants.

In both cases, the customer experience across sales channels is compromised, and the catalogue teams spend a considerable amount of time making manual corrections.

The product/variant model in ProductsManager

ProductsManager uses a two-level hierarchical model:

• Parent product— attributes common to all variants: brand, category, generic description, shared images, shared technical attributes
• Variants (SKUs)— the attributes that differentiate the variants: size, colour, capacity, weight, packaging, specific EAN, price, stock

A parent product can have N variants. Each variant inherits the parent’s attributes and overrides only what is different.

Variation axes: configure your model

Variation axes can be configured by product category. Common examples:

• Clothing / Fashion: Size (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL) × Colour
• Electronics: Capacity (64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB) × Colour
• Tools: Power (500W, 750W, 1000W) × Voltage (110V, 230V)
• Food / Household: Capacity (250ml, 500ml, 1L, 5L)
• Spare parts: Manufacturer’s part number × Model compatibility

You define your axes according to your sector — ProductsManager does not limit the number of axes or values per axis.

Supplier import: how variants are detected

Your suppliers often send you CSV files with one EAN per SKU, without any indication of variants. ProductsManager detects and groups variants in two ways:

• By parent EAN— if the supplier provides a parent product code (e.g. supplier reference without variations), SKUs sharing this code are grouped
• By standardisation rules— you define grouping rules based on common attributes (same brand + same model reference + different colour/size = variants of the same product)
• Manually— for ambiguous cases, the interface allows you to merge or split products from the catalogue view

Inheritance and attribute overriding

One of the key strengths of the ProductsManager model is its handling of inheritance. Basic rule :

• If a variant has no value for an attribute, it inherits the value from the parent product
• If a variant has its own value, it overrides the parent’s value for that attribute only

Practical example: you update the marketing description of the parent product — all variants immediately see the new description, without having to modify each SKU individually.

Variants and sales channels

Each sales channel has its own way of displaying variants:

• Shopify— product options (up to 3 dimensions), native Shopify variants with images per variant
• Amazon— Parent/Child ASINs, each variant is a child ASIN linked to a parent ASIN
• Fnac / Cdiscount— product_family model with variation attributes defined by the marketplace
• WooCommerce / PrestaShop— variable products with native variation attributes

Each channel’s connector handles the transformation of the PIM model into the expected format. You do not need to manually adapt the structure for each platform.

Images per variant

ProductsManager includes an Asset Library (DAM) module to manage images by variant. You can associate specific images with a variant (e.g. photo of the T-shirt in red, another photo in blue) whilst sharing generic images (back view, fabric detail) at the parent product level.

When pushing to channels, each image is sent to the correct level — variant image vs product image — according to the target platform’s rules.

Case study: textile retailer with 40,000 SKUs

A textile retailer with 5,000 parent products and 40,000 SKUs (an average of 8 variants per product):

• Weekly Excel import from the supplier with one row per SKU → automatic grouping into parent products by model reference
• Generic description generated by AI at parent level → inherited by all variants
• Prices and stock updated per SKU with every import → synchronised to Shopify and Amazon in real time
• Processing time for a catalogue update: 45 minutes (previously 3 days manually)