In short: no, for most marketing channels you cannot.
A few times a week we are getting the above questions as our plugin users would like to exclude all variations of a product and just upload the parent (variable) version of the product. We do understand as adding lots of almost identical variations of products to Google Shopping and Facebook seems pointless and doesn’t make the overview in Google’s Merchant Center or Facebooks business manager any clearer.
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. Hence, why advertise on a parent product you cannot even 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 just 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.