Product Merging on Expandly - Variation Products

Overview

In this guide, we will show you how to manually merge your variation products, on Expandly, to ensure accurate stock levels when sales orders import, or quantities are updated. 

What is variation merging? 

If you sell a variation product, and this has a different SKU or product title on different sales channels, you can perform a variation merge to link the quantities. 

For example:

I sell blue socks with variations (adult or kids), under SKUs 12A and 12K on Amazon, and SKUs 21A and 21K on eBay. I'll need to do a variation merge to link the quantities.

Things to note when performing a Variation Merge:

• If you sell on Amazon, their quantity updates works based on SKU so if this is removed from the product during the merging process, this will cause issues with inventory updates. To avoid this from happening, please select the Amazon product as the primary product when merging the variations on Expandly.
• When merging variations on Expandly, ensure attributes (the options you sell of the product) are an exact match across channels (i.e. if you sell Size and Colour options of a product, these must be the attribute names across all the channels - These could not be 'Choose Colour' or 'Select Size' for example). If they do not match, we recommend linking the quantities instead as creating a mismatch in variation attribute will cause errors when we attempt to push quantity updates. 
• You can only merge a maximum of 2x variation products together. If you need to merge more than 2x variations together, our recommendation will be to manually link this together instead. 
• Once Variation merges have been saved on Expandly, only the primary product selected will appear on your Expandly account. The other product/variations will be merged into the primary product and listings will become linked based on this merge. 
• Variation merges are irreversible. Once merged, you will not be able to unmerge the products/Listings on Expandly and will instead be required to delete the product(s) from Expandly and reimport to recreate the separate products and listings into Expandly.

Merging variation products on Expandly

1. Click Products & Listings (left menu) and then Manage Products:

2. On the Manage Products page, find and select the products that you wish to merge together using the search bar or filters:

3. Click (top right) and select the following:

Variation Merge - Linking a product with variations that has different SKUs or product titles

4.  Where Variation Merge is selected on the Warning popup, click (this is a warning to recommend that you link quantities instead of merge if attributes are not similar across the products)

5. On the Merge Products page, select the primary product and click

6. On the Map your Variations pop up, map your variations accordingly, using the dropdown. Once complete, click

7. Confirm that the merge does not infringe the rules of your sales channels by clicking

8. On the Editing Product page, make changes (if required) to product details and then click (top right). From here you can select from the following:

Save - Product merge and changes will be saved on Expandly only.

Save & List Now - This option will allow you to save the merge and also get the product (if not already) listed online.

Save & Revise - This will save the merge and will also allow you to push out any product changes you have made, to listings that already exist. 

Need more help?

If you need a little extra help, no problem. Contact us, and we'll be happy to help. 

Multi-Channel eCommerce Software | Expandly