Tutorials

Products and Product Families

Products and Product Families

A product is a sellable item: it carries its own product codes, pricing, inventory, and other details that describe a single unit for sale.

A product family is the container that groups one or more products that share common attributes, such as name, brand, category, and tags. Every product belongs to exactly one family.

Products and product families are managed through the 2026-10 /product_families and /products endpoints.

With the seperation of products and product families, we have removed the need for the concept of a variant parent.
Without a variant parent, some concepts become easier to understand. For example, when talking about images, we can see the clear distinction between an image for the product family, and an image for the product. previously, we had a product image and a variant image which became confusing when a variant parent was involved. Similarly, we saw incidents where entire families where incorrectly deleted, or deactivated, because the parent was.

Product families

To keep things familiar, we've carried forward the concepts of a standard product, a variant product and a composite product. You can see what a product family is by checking the classification field.
Every family has a classification that determines its shape:

  • Standard — the simplest family, made up of a single product (for example, a coffee mug).
  • Variant — a family of related products that differ by attributes such as size or colour (up to 200 variants per family).
  • Composite — like standard, a composite family has a single product. that product is assembled from other products, defined as a bill of materials (for example, a gift basket).

Family-level fields, such as name, description, brand, category, tags, and inventory tracking, are shared across the whole family. See the API Spec for details on the fields that live on a product family.

Products

Information such as product codes, pricing, inventory, suppliers and measurements belong to each individual product, so are considered product level fields. See the API Spec for details on the fields that live on a product.

There are some quirks of this structure regarding names. A product family has a name, and each product in that family shares that name. Each product will also have a variant_name field, which is used to differentiate products in a variant family. For example, a product family might be called "T-Shirt", and the products in that family might have variant names like "Red / Small", "Red / Medium", "Blue / Small", etc. For a standard family or a composite family, the variant_name is still present, but it just matches the family name.

Working with products

The following tutorials cover how to achieve specific tasks: