We're thrilled to announce the launch of a powerful new feature: Variation Slicing. This enhancement to our API allows you to better present the diverse variations of your products, grouping them in the ways that feel most correct to you, and being able to do so differently depending on the context. You’ve told us this would improve the overall product discovery experience for your end users, and we’ve heard you. 

Traditionally, different variations of the same product (e.g., different colors or sizes of a T-shirt) would be bundled together as a single item, or separated as all separate items, without much wiggle room in between. However, with the Variation Slicing feature, you can now split these variations and present them as distinct items or in distinct groups (e.g. separated by material, by groups of colors, by sale status, or any other grouping you think makes sense for you). 

For instance, let's say you have a T-shirt line available in various colors - red, blue, and green, as well as different styles - v-neck, round neck, and polo. With Variation Slicing, you can decide how these variations show up in search results and categories. If a customer searches for 'red v-neck t-shirts,' you can choose to display only the red v-necks as separate items, each with its unique size variations. But if the query is just 'v-neck t-shirts,' you can group all v-neck T-shirts of different colors together, while still separating them from round necks and polos.

Similarly, if a customer is looking for 'blue t-shirts,' you can split all blue T-shirts (irrespective of the style) from the other colors, presenting all blue t-shirts as individual items. In each scenario, you're optimizing your display based on the search context, effectively enhancing user experience. 

Variation Slicing enables you to enrich your product discovery process and add variety to categories. It provides you an avenue to highlight new or trending product variations, offering an even more exciting and richer shopping journey for your users. This feature heightens your product presentation, offering an unmatched level of flexibility for both search results and category groups.

Let's walk through an example:

To set a Variation Slicing rule, you would use the following API request:
Example request:

Sample item JSON payload:

Once this rule is set, each color variation of an item would be displayed as a separate result in the autocomplete, search, or browse responses.

As always, we recommend using Variation Slicing in conjunction with your other update routines to ensure that your catalog remains consistent and accurate.

We hope that this new feature will empower you to customize your catalog display to better meet the needs of your customers. For more detailed instructions on how to use Variation Slicing, please refer to our general description of variation slicing and to adding variation slicing rules to refined entities documentation.

We're looking forward to sharing more updates and improvements with you in the near future. If you have any questions or require further assistance with this new feature, please feel free to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or contact us at support@constructor.io.