If you’re new to Shopify, then you might find it a challenge to manage all those variants. However, that doesn’t mean that you should avoid them. Variants are a great way to give customers choice without overloading your shop page with the same product again and again with little difference.

However, there are going to be times when variants are no longer offered. For instance, one product might have lines reduced, like a dress no longer made in red or a phone case design that has been discontinued.

Therefore, you have to delete these product variants from your website. Otherwise, you might have customers who pre-order non-existing incoming stock or damage your reputation with lots of products that are out of stock.

Luckily, there is a simple bulk edit option to do this. And this article will look carefully into this.

Key Takeaways
1
Access your Shopify admin area of your website for product management.
2
Select the product that you wish to remove all the variants in Shopify, then edit to remove variants.
3
Confirm deletion to streamline your product listings in Shopify to make the changes permanent.

What Is Counted as a Product Variant?

A product variant is the same product with a difference. For instance, clothing that comes in different sizes, a ball that comes in different colors or a phone case with different designs or for different phone models. The choices are endless, and this is the problem.

Sometimes you can be overwhelmed by the number of variants there are. This is why sometimes you can’t have all the variants on a product. For example, a dress that comes in five colors and ten sizes. That would be 50 variances on a product. It would be too hard for customers to manage. It would be better to split the dress into five color products and have the variance as the size.

The Problem with Deleting Variants

When you try to delete all the variants for a product on Shopify, the system finds it very difficult. What happens is that Shopify thinks that you still need one variant. You will get an error message telling you that option1 field cannot be blank.

There is option to hide the product variant without deleting them, but if you still want to delete them altogether, there is an easier way to sort this out, and you have to follow these steps.

Step 1 - Log in

The first step is to access the Shopify admin area of your website.

Step 2 - Products

Now go to the ‘Online Store’ and then ‘Products’ area of your website. Then select the product that you wish to remove all the variants from.

Step 3 - Variant

Now scroll down until you find the option for ‘Variant’ and select the ‘Edit’ option.

Step 4 - Default

Now type ‘Default’ to change the variant name and remove all other variants from your website.

Step 5 - Save

Click on ‘Save’ to make the changes permanent.