Ahh yes, Amazon product variations. Not the simplest idea to understand, but here’s a try.

Within Amazon, products with variations have a “Parent” and “Children” that belong to the Parent. However, at Amazon these parents are virtual, they are not real. If your “Parents” never came to your baseball games or gymnastic meets you may have had virtual parents too.. But I digress.

As an example, look up this Amazon fashion product  “Nannette Baby Girls’ Mock 2-Piece Sweater Knit Dress”.

You will see the child’s dress in off-white and all of the sizes listed, 0-3 months, 3-6 months etc. These sizes are the variants of the virtual parent.

If you scroll down a bit further, you will see the product description with the ASIN listed as: B00XW29R66. Now, you would think that if you searched for this ASIN you would be taken to the same listing as before, and you would be wrong.

Go ahead and go back to Amazon and type in the search box B00XW29R66. Don’t worry, I’ll be here when you come back.

Yep, didn’t find anything did you? Exactly, a virtual parent.

Now take one more step and go to your Seller Central account and add a new product using that same virtual ASIN: B00XW29R66. What the what? It’s there!

That’s right, it’s there, but once again you cannot add anything for that ASIN. You have to use one of its Children as a listing, and so does ByteStand.

How We Translate Amazon’s Parent-Child Relationships Into Shopify

When we pull your inventory into Shopify we cannot pull something that does not exist, meaning a Virtual Parent. Therefore, what we do is grab all of the real Children for a particular product and then assign the first SKU to be the Parent, and the rest Children of that Parent.

This causes chaos when the new virtual Parent starts abusing her newfound authority and bossing around her siblings, but in Shopify it works great.

The only step you’ll have to take is to potentially update the title of the product, but its really the only solution possible to Amazon’s virtual family tree.