Child Products

Child products inherit attributes from their parent products. When you make changes to the attributes of the parent products, you can rebuild your child products, ensuring that changes to the parent products are propagated to the child products.

Alternatively, you can modify a child product independently, without impacting its parent product. For example, you may prefer the status of your child product to be live, while keeping the parent product's status as draft. When you directly update a child product, it becomes independent of its parent product. In other words, any subsequent changes made to the parent product are not automatically reflected in the child product when you rebuild the parent product and its child products. Once a child product is independent of its parent, you cannot recreate the association between the child product and its parent. You must delete the child product and rebuild the parent to recreate the child product.

Following on from that, if you add the same flow to both a parent and child product, the child flow values are not affected by changes to the parent flow values in a rebuild.

In addition, when building your child products, you can choose to exclude or include certain combinations of variation options. This is useful, for example, if you have a variation option that you do not sell. This makes managing and building your child products quick and easy. See Build child products.

Re-building child products after adding or removing a new variation changes the total number of child products that you can generate from a base product. When you rebuild the child products after updating variations associated with the base product, all existing child products that belong to a base product are deleted. New child products are created with new product IDs.

If you have any bundles that reference child products directly, then you must update the bundles with the new child product IDs.

However, re-building child products after adding or removing an option does not change the existing product IDs.