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This is an incredibly powerful tool for catalog users that have Items with variations. It basically allows you to define selectable options for your items that have different flavors (colors, sizes, etc.). Although you could utilize Item Options to fill this need, you wouldn't get the inventory control and reporting that Variations will fulfill.
A good example would be clothing that requires 3 different variations. Our table below shows a merchants offering for pants available in different sizes, and colors. Therefore, the variations to be created will be Waist, Length and Color.
Create Parent and Child Items
To begin you must create a parent item in Item Management. In our example above, the parent item would be Pants (Item ID). All the variations for pants will also be created as separate store items (children). In doing so and with the appropriate catalog template, we make it possible to automatically display the items along with drop down choices for each of the variations.
Another benefit to creating the individual items (SKUs) is that you will be able to maintain accurate inventory and reporting. As you can see below, we have created the parent item and all the child items for the above inventory for Fancy Pants Store (fictitious).
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Add Variations
Variations are defined in the PARENT ITEM only. Click on the Item ID of the Parent Item. In this example it would be Item ID "Pants". At the Item Editor screen, click on the Catalog tab. The first section at this screen is Variations.
In our example we need to create 3 variations; Color, Length, and Waist. To add (create) our first variation, enter the name in the box provided and click on the "add variation" button. Repeat this step for all variations. Note: give some real thought ahead of time of your variation names. There is no edit button for changing the name. The only way to change a variation name is to delete it and create a new one. If you delete the variation after your complete all values, you will lose all the data for that variation.
Once created, the variation will appear along with it's own "delete" button below it. There will also be an "add item" field and button. We'll use these in the next step. Repeat this step for all the variations for this item.
In our example (below) we created 3 variations; Color, Length, and Waist. Notice again that the variations now appear in 3 separate columns along with Item Id and Description columns.
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