This article covers the three important aspects of dummy variants.
What are dummy variants?
How are dummy variants created?
Why do dummy variants exist?
What are dummy variants?
Dummy variants are the possible product variants that were not specified in the uploaded template.
Why do dummy variants exist?
Etsy rejects our uploads unless we provide all possible variant combinations, however, in practice, many listings do not have all possible combinations. These listings should still be uploaded so we create the dummy variants to satisfy Etsy's requirement automatically.
Important note
If your products have more than 70 option values you will receive an error. In this example you have 6 option values. Those are small, med, large, red, blue, and green.
How are dummy variants created?
Dummy variants are created when your variants do not address every possible option combination.
Say your upload document looks something like the table above. Without dummy variants, you would have six variant combinations:
However, with dummy variants, you end up with 9 different variant combinations.
On the other hand, the following tables will not create dummy variants. In this scenario, all possible variant combinations are already accounted for.
