Variants, Products, Product Groups - what's the difference?
There are structural and functional differences between Shopify's e-commerce platform and Meta's advertising ecosystem:
- On Meta, product variants are created by adding multiple products and grouping them together by the same
item_group_idfield. - Shopify splits products into variants (assigning a unique
variant_idto each variation of the same product).
On Shopify, every product has at least a single variant. Technically, there is no such thing as a product with a price. Only variants have prices. That is why every product has at least a single variant.
As a result, we need to map what Shopify calls variants to what Facebook calls items:
| Shopify | Meta (Facebook & Instagram) |
|---|---|
| Variant ID | Item ID |
| Product ID | Item Group ID |
On Shopify, a Product can have many variants. On Facebook, many Items can belong to the same item group.