Amazon calls a group of related listings a variation family: one parent that customers never buy directly, and a set of children that they do. A T-shirt in three colours is one parent and three children. The app builds that structure for you out of your Shopify variants.
The app creates a parent plus children when both of these are true:
If either is false, for example a product with a single variant, or a product with an option that only ever has one value, the app publishes it as a single standalone listing instead. No parent is created and none is needed.
When a family is created, the parent SKU is named after your product handle with -parent appended, and each Shopify variant becomes a child SKU underneath it.
Amazon needs to know what the children vary by. It calls this the variation theme, and it expects a specific value such as COLOR or SIZE.
The app works the theme out from the names of your Shopify options. Not the values, the names.
| Your Shopify option is named | The Amazon variation theme becomes |
|---|---|
| Colour, or Color | COLOR |
| Size | SIZE |
| Material | MATERIAL |
| Style | STYLE |
| Anything else | STYLE |
That last row is the one to pay attention to.
Warning
There is no clever guessing here. If your Shopify option is named "Shade", "Finish", "Flavour", "Pack size" or "Variant", the app does not recognise it and the variation theme falls back to
STYLE. Amazon will accept the listing, but your family will be presented to shoppers as a style choice rather than as a colour or size choice, which is not what you want on a swatch or a size chart.
The fix costs nothing and takes a minute: rename the option in Shopify. An option named "Shade" that holds Red, Blue and Green should simply be named "Colour". An option named "Pack size" holding Small, Medium and Large should be named "Size". Rename it, save the product, and re-push.
Tip
Do this before your first push, not after. Renaming an option after a family exists on Amazon means Amazon has already built the family around the old theme, and unpicking a variation family in Seller Central is considerably more work than getting the option name right up front.
Every listing the app creates needs a seller SKU, which is the identifier you and Amazon both use to refer to your offer.
The app uses your Shopify variant SKU as the Amazon SKU. This is the behaviour you want, because it means the SKU you see in Seller Central is the SKU you see in Shopify and in your warehouse.
If a Shopify variant has no SKU, the app generates one from the product handle and the variant ID, in the form <handle>-<variantId>. The listing still works, but the SKU is meaningless to a human reading a picking list or an Amazon report.
Tip
Fill in your Shopify variant SKUs before your first push. SKUs are edited on the Shopify product page and never inside the app, and once a listing exists on Amazon under a generated SKU, changing it means creating a new SKU rather than renaming the old one.
You do not choose an ASIN. An ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) is Amazon's own identifier for a catalogue entry, and Amazon decides it.
When you push, Amazon either matches your product to an existing catalogue entry, usually via your barcode, and gives you an offer on that entry's ASIN, or it creates a new catalogue entry and assigns a fresh ASIN. Either way the ASIN is assigned by Amazon, not by you.
The app then reads the ASIN back and writes the home-market ASIN into the variant's amazon_asin metafield in Shopify. That write matters, because it is what connects Product Sync to the rest of the app:
In other words, once a variation family is published, everything else in the app lights up for those variants without further setup.
Each child in a family carries its own identifier, taken from that variant's barcode. If some variants have a barcode and others do not, expect uneven results: the ones with a barcode are far more likely to be matched cleanly onto an existing Amazon catalogue entry. Barcodes, like SKUs, are edited on the Shopify product page.