Sibling products
Sibling products allow you to set up variants as individual products with their own images and product details.
On product pages, sibling products appear as variant swatches. In collections and product listings, sibling products are displayed as individual products.
Set up sibling products
To set up sibling products you will need to add individual products to a new collection, then add and update two metafields for each sibling product.
Create products with unique images and details
Add products to a collection to group together as 'siblings'
Create two metafields to show siblings as swatches and add option names to products
1. Add individual products to siblings collection
To create a group of sibling products, you need to create individual products and add them to a new collection. The collection is used to group your sibling products together as variant options.
2. Set up metafields for sibling products
Once your sibling products are added to a collection, you need to add two metafields to your products.
Sibling products use metafields to (a) display sibling products as swatches and (b) give each product a variant option name.
Metafields are custom fields added to your products in the Shopify admin. The steps below will cover all you need to know, but if you'd like to learn more, see Shopify's guide to metafields ↗.
2a. Create metafield for siblings collection
Go to Settings > Custom data to create the first metafield for your Products. This metafield will be used to display sibling products as swatches.
The metafield requires the following fields:
Name
Siblings collection
Namespace and key
eclipse.siblings_collection
Must be exact to work. Note that 'siblings' is plural with an 's'. Do not add or modify words.
Type
Collection (Reference)
If you are creating multiple sibling collections, you only need to create one metafield.
2b. Define metafield for sibling option name
Go to Settings > Custom data to create the second metafield for your Products. This metafield will be used to give individual products a variant option name (e.g. "Red" or "Wood").
The metafield requires the following fields:
Name
Sibling option name
Namespace and key
eclipse.sibling_option_name
Must be exact to work. Note that 'sibling' is singular with no 's'. Do not add or modify words.
Type
Single line text
3. Update metafields for each sibling product
After creating the 2 metafields, go to Products in your Shopify admin to add information to the metafields.
That's it! the sibling product swatches will now automatically display on the product pages.
Change option label
By default, the label above the sibling swatches is "Color". Go to Theme settings > Products to change the Siblings label.
Use product image or color for swatches
Sibling products swatches can display product images or custom colors.
Use product images
By default, siblings use product images for the swatches.
In your Shopify admin, go to Products to upload and select images for your individual sibling products. Click and drag the product image you want to the first position in the product media gallery.
Use custom colors
Sibling can use custom colors for swatches. To use colors for swatches, go to Theme settings > Products and uncheck Use product images as swatches.
To set up custom swatch colors, you can assign a hex code to your product option in Theme settings > Swatches.
You can use a HTML color picker like this one to find the hexcode for your color. Select and copy the six-character hex code, including the hashtag symbol.
Hide sibling collections
By default, all published collections appear on the Collections list page and in Search results. Follow the steps below to hide sibling collections on your store.
Hide from collections list page
To hide a sibling collection from the Collections list page, you can choose to show only selected collections, instead of all collections.
Hide from search results
While Shopify doesn't provide an option to hide collections, you can use metafields as a workaround to remove specific collections from search results.
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