Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages

[birchlore]

Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors.

I have two routes I could take:

a) Make 50 separate product pages

Pros:

-Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats.

-Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat).

Cons:

-Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color)

b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants

Pros:

-More elegant and organized

-NO duplicate Content

Cons:

-Losing out on color specific search terms

-Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions.

Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?

[wissamdandan]

I would go definitely with B

**BUT **If you would like to go with A because based on your data (site search and other inteligence tools and business goals )

I would create 50 urls and use the rel canonical for the ranking candidate for each product.

[AWCthreads]

Plan B with a left nav color filter if you have it or are capable of implementing it.

[katandmouse]

Do people really search for red Boston Bruins hats? Or do they search for Boston Bruins hats? Frankly, as a consumer, I'd find it annoying to have to sort through that many more pages if you implemented A. But since color may be important, I'd make it a filter as AWC suggests. I'm not familiar with Shopify, so don't know if it's built in. If not, I'd build it. I'd address your last usability concern the same way - i.e., customize your software.