thread Re: Creating Options with to many Varations in Orders, Menu Items, Catalog & Fulfilment

Creating Options with too many Varations

SilverRainCraft — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:35:50 GMT

Hi everyone!

I'm running into some confusion and an issue. I'm hoping for a solution, explanation, or a work around.

I'm selling keychains. I will be eventually providing 18 color options! Some have the option for 2 colors. So in the options I'd like to have all the colors in both drop down options. But when I do that I have to many variations (324). In actually I only have 153 variations but the system will create 2 variations for grey, green and green, grey even though they are the same color.

The only work around I have found is to delete the duplicates but then as a consumer looking at the website the options will have missing colors or they have to be a specific order. I don't want people to miss out on color combinations and its just frustrating on my end.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Re: Creating Options with to many Varations

TheRealChipA — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 19:03:02 GMT

Hi @SilverRainCraft. You’ve run into an issue that I’m not sure was foreseen when Square created and tested the options feature for auto-variation creation. I’m guessing that the case of using the same set of, in your example, colors twice did not come up when this was beta tested and I’ve not seen anyone else bring it up yet.

What is happening is that the options feature is assuming that you want every permutation of the items in both sets. In this specific case what you want are the combinations, which would automatically remove any duplicates. Permutations see green-blue as different from blue-green, while combinations consider them the same.

For now, so that you can get your store up and running, I’m going to suggest that you do not use options/variations for this. Instead, hopefully it will work for you to set up two modifier sets — one for Color1 (required) and one for Color2 (optional) for customers to specify their choices. Honestly, in my mind, using modifier sets will be much simpler and cleaner for customers to deal with, rather than having to scroll through 152 color variations. But I might be missing something you haven’t mentioned. If so, feel free to get me up to speed.

Re: Creating Options with to many Varations

Candlestore — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:05:28 GMT

@SilverRainCraft ;

I found out before that if you have over 120 or over 125 variations Square would give issues for selling online. I am not sure if this was fixed or not. One of the reasons my online store is not with Square. Now a way to combat this for you might be to:

create:

Category Keychains

Items Key Chains Shades of Green

Key Chains Shades of Red

Key Chains Shades of Blue

Then you could have the variations of Green colors in the Item Key Chains Shades of Green

From your example this would give you about 3 or 4 variations per item of Key Chains Shades of Green

Variations

grey,

green and grey,

green

etc

Re: Creating Options with to many Varations

SilverRainCraft — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 15:32:25 GMT

Thank you. This seems to fix my issue and I will be using it on several products. I never thought to use modifiers this way. In truth modifiers kind of confused me yet as I'm still new to square.