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 |
|
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 |
|
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
Go to Theme settings > Products and select the Use product images as swatches option.
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
Go to Theme settings > Swatches to assign custom swatch colors. Enter the option name followed by a colon (:
) and a hex code (eg. #00b300
) for your desired color.
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.
Last updated