Shopify is preventing merchants from managing even the simplest multi-variant product catalogs natively due to ineffective variant management. This a core workflow, and the workarounds so painful, that it’s become the no. 2 merchant frustration (by support volume) in the products space.

Our long-term strategy is to make it possible for merchants to manage all of their product catalog within Shopify. We need to make adding new variants more efficient now, because soon, in a world of > 100 variants per product, this problem will only get worse. This capability will become more important than ever before as merchants will be able to create much larger variant catalogues. 

This project was originally scoped to only the UI in which merchants generate variants. Through my leadership, I coached the team in building UX rationale to develop an augment that would enable us to extend the scope, in the name of solving the right problem, in the right way, that matched merchants workflows and beat their  expectations

Reduce volume of support tickets about adding variants after product creation by 40%.

In Shopify admin (web), it’s possible to add a new option with multiple values to a product —with correct images, prices, SKUs —in less than 5 minutes, against our set baseline.

This project will make it easy for merchants to expand a product offering by adding new options and values at scale. 

The desired outcome is to build an experience that can scale with our future view of variant management, and quantifiably save our merchants time through efficient UI. Merchants would retain merchants workflows in the admin.