Linked ListingsGuide

How to set up combined listings without Shopify Plus

Many stores sell each color of an item as its own product: "Linen Shirt - Sage" and "Linen Shirt - Navy" each get their own page, photos and URL. That is good for search and for ads, but shoppers on one color page can't see or switch to the others. Shopify's own Combined Listings app solves this, but it is only available on Shopify Plus. Here is how to get the same result on Basic, Shopify or Advanced.

Option 1: Turn the colors into variants of one product

Merge the products into a single product with a Color option. Every theme shows variant pickers natively and it costs nothing.

Downsides: you lose the separate URLs and their search ranking (set up 301 redirects from the old pages), each color no longer appears separately in collections, and a product is limited to 2,048 variants across all options. Stores with many sizes per color hit that limit fast.

Option 2: Link products with metafields and theme code

  1. In Settings → Custom data → Products, add a metafield definition of type "List of products" (for example custom.sibling_colors) and a single-line text metafield for the color name.
  2. On each product, fill in its siblings and color name.
  3. In your theme's product template, loop over product.metafields.custom.sibling_colors.value and render a link to each sibling, styled as a swatch.

Downsides: every product in a group must be edited by hand (and edited again when you add a color), theme edits are lost when you switch or update themes, and collection-page swatches need more custom code.

Option 3: Use an app

Several apps on the Shopify App Store link separate products as swatches on any plan. When comparing them, check: whether you have to build each group by hand, whether swatches appear on collection pages, whether the app edits your product data, and whether it works with your theme without code.

We make one of them, Linked Listings. It scans your catalog, suggests the groups for you (products named like "Shirt - Sage" / "Shirt - Navy"), adds swatches with a theme block, and only stores one hidden field per product. It is free for up to 5 groups.

Which should you pick?