What is a product family?
A product family is a named group of products that should be treated as variations of the same item for merchandising purposes. The most common use case is grouping color variants, material variants, or regional variations of the same style so that a collection page shows a broader assortment instead of six near-duplicate rows of the same style in a row. Product families are a building block for other features:- Diversity expressions cap how many products from the same family appear in the top of a collection.
- Future family-aware merchandising features reuse the same groupings.
canonical, which represents “this is the same underlying product.”
How families are created
Layers supports two sources for a family:| Source | Who manages it | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| Manual | A merchandiser, in the Product Families dashboard | When your grouping logic doesn’t map to a single attribute (for example, you want to hand-curate a capsule collection as one “family”) |
| Automatic | Layers, from a product attribute you select | When a reliable attribute (a metafield, vendor, or calculated attribute) already identifies the group |
Automatic families from an attribute
You configure which attributes drive automatic families in Settings → Product Families. Each entry points at a single attribute whose value will be used as the family key. Layers supports three kinds of attributes as family sources:- Direct product fields and nested keys — for example,
vendor,custom.style_code, ornamed_tags.color. - Calculated attributes — any attribute with a code that starts with
calculated., such ascalculated.style_group. The calculated attribute is evaluated per product and its string result becomes the family key. - Metafields — Shopify metafields synced into your catalog.
Array-valued attributes (like
tags) and metric attributes are not supported as family sources, because a single product cannot cleanly belong to multiple families through one attribute.How automatic assignment works
- Layers reads the configured attribute for each product during catalog sync.
- If the value is non-empty, the product is assigned to a family named
Auto: <attribute>:<value>. Products sharing the same value land in the same family. - If the value is empty or missing, the product is removed from any automatically assigned family for that attribute.
- Families that become empty are cleaned up automatically.
Prerequisites
Before you can configure automatic family sources, the attribute you want to use must already exist and be synced into your catalog. See Attributes and Metafields to add one.Manual families
Manual families are fully editable in the dashboard. A manual family has:- A name you choose (for example, Heritage Tee — All Colors).
- A list of member products. A family should contain at least two products to be useful.
Creating a manual family
See the step-by-step guide at Create a product family.Editing and deleting
- Manual families can be renamed, have members added or removed, and can be deleted individually or in bulk from the Product Families list.
- Automatic families cannot be edited or deleted from the dashboard. To change their membership, update the attribute values on your products. Automatic families disappear on their own when they have no remaining members.