In short: no, for most marketing channels you cannot.
We receive the above questions from our plugin users a few times a week. They want to exclude all variations of a product and only upload the parent (variable) version of the product. We understand that adding many almost identical variations of products to Google Shopping and Facebook seems pointless and doesn’t provide clarity in Google’s Merchant Center or Facebook’s business manager.
Yet, Google, Facebook and some other channels NOT allow you to add the parent product to the product feed for two simple reasons:
- The variations are priced, the parent product itself doesn’t have a price;
- The parent product itself cannot be bought by consumers; it is actually the variations of the parent product that you are selling. Therefore, why advertise a parent product you cannot sell?
Our plugin does however offer you the option to exclude individual variations from the product feed by creating “exclude filters”. An easier option is to simply enable the “Exclude from feeds” checkbox on the product edit pages. This checkbox will only show when you have enabled the ‘Add GTIN, MPN, UPC, Product condition…..’ option in the settings section of our plugin which is part of our paid Elite plan.
This will result in individual product variations being excluded from the product feed. You can that opt to exclude all but one version of a product so only one variation of each parent product makes it to the product feed.
There is an exception to the above rule, for Skroutz feeds the plugin does add parent variable products to feeds (as of version 8.4.8 of the plugin).
Alternatively, our plugin also offers the possibility to add just one variation of a variable product to your feeds. Read our post on how to add only one variation of a variable product to your feeds.
