Variant Grouping ensures that different variations of the same product (e.g., a t-shirt in multiple colors) don’t appear multiple times within a single recommendation or in Search and categories. This enhances diversity, reduces visual clutter, and optimizes screen space to improve the shopper experience.

The feature functions in two-folded manner, but the core concept is the same between Recommendations and Search & Categories. However, each have separate settings to support full flexibility. Search Variant Grouping impacts search results and category listings, Recommendation Variant Grouping applies to product recommendations shown throughout the store.

Before Grouping

Without grouping, merchants often see multiple color variations of the same product appearing in recommendations. This happens because many merchants (especially in Shopify) structure their catalogs with color variations as standalone parent products rather than actual variants.

After Grouping

Once enabled, Nosto groups product variations under a single representation, ensuring that recommendations:

How Does it Work

Merchants have to define a shared attribute (such as a main product ID or a custom field) in Nosto, which is used for grouping under Recommendation Settings

Nosto then automatically prevents duplicate product variations from appearing in the same recommendation. The logic applies globally across all Recommendations, eliminating the need for manual filters.

How to Enable Recommendation Variant Grouping

Technical Considerations

Recommendation grouping works separately from Variant Grouping in Search but follows a similar concept. It is not limited to Shopify, though it particularly benefits Shopify merchants due to common catalog structures.

Variant grouping enables you to remove duplicated search results which may occur due to multiple child products that were imported to the Nosto database. If these child products have a parent ID field it is possible to group the child variants to the parent ID - for each of the group fields (e.g. parent_ID) the search will return only the most relevant product.
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Please note that the fields that you want to choose for grouping have to be added to the indexed fields beforehand.

By default all SKUs are merged into one product. This ensures the best performance and works for the most cases. You can still use SKUs fields (like SKUs custom fields or availability).
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When using facets or filters on SKU fields, certain limitations become apparent. For example, suppose you intend to retrieve all products that have a red color in their SKU custom field and are marked as in stock in the availability field. In this scenario, the search results will include products containing at least one SKU in stock and at least one SKU labeled as red, irrespective of their individual stock status. This occurs due to the method where the SKU fields are copied to the parent product, resulting in the loss of all specific relations between them.
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This option indexes each SKU as a separate product. Combine it with grouping by field to return only one product per parent product id (you can use productId field for grouping when this option is set). It will bring the following advantages: