Variations are the Spice of Life
One powerful feature of ChannelAdvisor Complete is inventory variations. You may also hear this called “matrix inventory” or “parent/child relationships.” The main advantage of implementing inventory variations is that you can group many similar items together so they appear to the buyer as a single entry in your online store with configurable choices. This makes your store less cluttered and easier to navigate - with the end result that the buyers can more easily find and purchase what they want!
For instance, say you are selling shoes. For every style of shoe you stock there is a size and color, and therefore you have one SKU for each style/size/color combination. Normally you and your buyers would have to operate on each SKU individually. With inventory relationships, you can create a parent SKU that represents all inventory for that style, and have a group of child SKUs that vary by size and color.
As an example, let’s look at the ChannelAdvisor Store for one of our good friends, Designer Athletic. They have configured most of their inventory within ChannelAdvisor to be in variation relationships, but here is an example of one that isn’t.
This shows a single entry for a Timberland size nine brown chukka boot. If the buyer was actually looking for a size ten, they could not buy it from this page. They would have to leave and look for the correct size. Once they found the size ten in the right style, perhaps they really wanted a different color. More hunting. Wouldn’t it be easier if all of these related shoes were available on one page?
Enter inventory variations. If you group all shoes of a particular style into one relationship with variations of size and color, you can display a single page to the buyer with all of their options. Take a look at this ChannelAdvisor Store page for a Timberland field boot.
Note the choices for size and color. In addition, there is no final price displayed because it varies for the individual child SKUs. At this point, the buyer can select the size that they are looking for.
If this item wasn’t in a variation relationship, there sure would be a lot of individual product pages in the store. In this case there would be the number of sizes times the number of colors - that would get very large very quickly. Another cool thing here is that the size choices shown are limited to the SKUs currently in stock. If Designer Athletic had sold out of size eight field boots, the number eight would not appear in the list for the buyer to select.
Once the buyer chooses the size, they are shown the available colors in that size. Again, only the colors in stock are shown as choices.
Also note that these child SKUs have their own images, and so when the buyer choses a color the product picture automatically changes to the appropriate one. The available choices for color will change depending on what the buyer choses for the size, so if they were instead looking for size nine boots there would be a different list as shown below.
Once all the choices have been filled in, the buyer is presented with the final price and can purchase the specific shoe they were looking for.
ChannelAdvisor also supports sending inventory variation information to Amazon’s Seller Central. Amazon refers to these as parent/child relationships. There is nothing special you have to do to your inventory in ChannelAdvisor - once the relationships are set up they can be sent to Amazon. Below is an example of what an equivalent listing looks like on Amazon’s site.
Amazon shows all possible values for the variations, but as the buyer moves their mouse over the choices certain combinations are disabled if they are not available. Pretty slick.
In summary, inventory variations are a wonderful way to organize your inventory and streamline the buyer experience. Be sure to check out the ChannelAdvisor Complete online help for details on setting this up in your account.