Creating Product Variants with Options

The Options Builder

The Options Builder is the fastest way to create product variants. Instead of adding variants one at a time, you define your product's options and Cartly automatically generates every combination as a variant.

Adding Options and Values

On the product edit page, open the Options section:

1. Click Add Option and name it (e.g., "Color", "Size", "Material"). Option names are fully flexible — including multilingual names for stores selling in multiple languages.
2. Add values for the option as chips — type a value and press Enter, or paste a comma-separated list. For example, a "Color" option might have the values Red, Blue, Green.
3. Repeat for up to 3 options per product.

As soon as you have at least one option with values, Cartly generates the full variant matrix — the cartesian product of every option's values. Two options with 3 and 2 values each produce 6 variants; three options with 3, 2, and 2 values produce 12 variants.

Editing the Variant Grid

Every generated variant appears as a row in a single grid below the Options section. For each variant you can edit:

• Price — the selling price for this specific combination
• SKU — a unique stock keeping unit for this variant
• Barcode — UPC, EAN, or ISBN for this variant
• Cost — your cost of goods for this variant (see Tracking Product Cost (COGS))

Changes to the grid are saved together with the rest of the product — there is no separate save step per variant.

Stock Is Managed in the Inventory Block

The variants grid does not edit stock. Stock levels are tracked per location in the Inventory block further down the product page, exactly as with single-variant products. This means saving your product's price, SKU, or option changes never disturbs your existing location stock levels.

Removing an Option Value

If you remove a value from an option (for example, discontinuing the "Extra Small" size), Cartly removes exactly the variants that were generated from that value. Variants built from the remaining option values are left untouched — their price, SKU, barcode, and cost are preserved.

Storefront Behavior

On the storefront, customers pick a value for each option and Cartly resolves the matching variant automatically. Option pickers work correctly no matter how you named your options, and combinations that are out of stock are shown accurately so customers do not add unavailable combinations to their cart.