Category: Products · Min plan: Pro · Slug: cascading-variants
Create dependent variant groups — e.g., Brand → Model. Child groups only appear when the parent option is selected.
Features
Parent-child variant groups
Brand → Model cascading
Works with color and text variants
Compatible with variant stock tracking
Compatible with combination stock
When to use
If you sell phone cases, car parts, replacement batteries, or anything where the customer flow is "pick a brand, then pick a compatible model", this add-on cleans up the variant picker:
Without it: every Brand×Model pair has to be its own product, or you accept long flat dropdowns where the customer can choose impossible combinations.
With it: Brand is shown first; once chosen, only the matching Model options are revealed.
How to activate
Open Dashboard → Add-ons at
/dashboard/addons.Find Cascading Variants under the Products category.
Click Activate (Pro plan required).
Open a product at
/dashboard/products/createor/dashboard/products/{id}/edit→ the Variants section now exposes a Depends on picker. It appears on the second and later variant groups only — the first group has no possible parent.
Setup walkthrough
A child group maps to one parent option, not to a whole parent group. So you create one child group per parent option:
Create the parent group Brand with options Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi.
Create one separate child group per brand — Apple models, Samsung models, Xiaomi models — each holding only that brand's models.
On each child group, set Depends on to the matching parent option. The dropdown lists entries as Brand → Apple. Leaving it blank means the group is always visible.
Save. The storefront shows only the child group whose parent option the customer picked.
Each child group can depend on exactly one parent option.
Compatibility
Hide/show works for
color,textandimage_textgroups. Note that on product pages, when the customer switches parent option, animage_textoption in the branch being left keeps its visual highlight even though the selection itself has been cleared, so prefercolorortextinside cascading child groups.Switching the parent option clears every selection below it and recalculates the displayed price straight away.
Stock tracking is preserved at every level: option stock, combination stock, or product stock — see Variants.
Multi-level cascades are supported: Brand → Model → Year. Each child group declares the single parent option it depends on.
Where the cascade applies
Product pages.
Landing page order forms.
The Digital theme product page, as long as the Digital Product Variants add-on is not also driving that product. See the warning below.
⚠️ Warning — Do not put cascading variants and the Digital Product Variants accordion on the same product
When the accordion mounts, it hides the standard variant picker and rebuilds the groups in its own list, and it leaves cascading child groups out of that list. The cascading add-on then shows and hides those child groups inside a picker the buyer can no longer see, so the child groups never appear at all and the buyer cannot choose a model.
The accordion mounts only when the product has at least one non-cascading group. If every group on the product is a cascading child, the accordion bails out, the standard picker stays visible and the cascade works normally. Anything in between is broken, so on the Digital theme pick one of the two add-ons per product.
📝 Note — Hidden child groups never block an order
The customer only has to pick from the groups on screen. A customer who picks Apple never sees the Samsung models group, and the order goes through without a pick from it.
Tips
Per-combination stock does not follow the cascade: the combination table pairs every option of every group, child groups included, so it does not shrink to the valid (Brand, Model) pairs and can reach the 1,000-combination limit. Track stock per option instead when the table gets too large.