Creating Products

Multi-SKU products

Products that come in variations — sizes, colors, styles — modeled as one family with sellable child SKUs you can name and price together.

A multi-SKU product is one product that comes in variations — the same shirt in three sizes, a mug in four colors. Tangerine Star models it as a family: a parent that names the group, and child SKUs that are the things you actually sell.

How a family is shaped

The parent is the family label — "Harbor Mug." It isn't sold directly and has no price of its own.
Each child SKU is a real, sellable item — "Harbor Mug, Navy" — with its own name, scan code, price, and inventory count.

This is why a variation can be counted and priced on its own: the child is the product. The parent just holds them together.

Working with the variations

On the family's product page, a Variations table lists every child with its price, cost, on-hand, on-order, UPC, and SKU. You can:

Edit any child inline — click a field, change it, done.
Set the default child — the star marks the "face" of the family.
Edit the whole set at once with Tory — the bar above the table takes plain-language requests and previews the change on every child before applying.

Ask Tory things like "round all prices to .95,""add the size to each name," or "title-case every name." She shows the before-and-after for each child and applies only what you confirm.

Names that stay in sync

Child names are usually composed from the family name plus what makes each one different — rename the family "Harbor Mug" to "Harbor Ceramic Mug" and the children follow automatically. But if you've given a child a custom name, it stays put: a family rename won't overwrite a name you set deliberately. The table marks those custom names so you can tell at a glance.

Multi-SKU families and assortments are cousins. A plain multi-SKU family varies along simple axes like size and color; an assortment is the more complex case — more dimensions, or variations that only make sense in the context of that specific order. The mechanics of child SKUs are the same either way.

See how to read and edit a family — including the Variations table and Tory bar — on Reading & editing a product.

Assortments

Turn one purchase line into the many distinct products you actually sell — with the cost split across them so nothing drifts.

The Rules hub

One page that shows every automated decision Tangerine Star makes for your products — set your store defaults, and see every vendor exception.