Managing Duplicate Products

This guide provides essential information for handling duplicate products created during the setup of a price experiment in Elevate A/B Testing. These duplicates are crucial for conducting your experiments but require careful management to ensure a seamless shopping experience.

Step 1: Accessing duplicate products in Shopify

1. Navigate to Your Experiment: Within the Elevate A/B Testing dashboard, locate the experiment you're conducting. Click on the experiment to enter its detailed view.

2. Overview Tab: Switch to the Overview tab within your experiment's detailed view. Here, you will find a comprehensive breakdown of your experiment, including its various variations.

3. Edit Experiment Variations: Scroll down to the section labeled "Test Groups." Each variation represents a different test condition within your experiment, including those involving duplicate products for price testing. Click "Edit" on any of the experiment variations you wish to examine.

4. Viewing in Shopify: Upon clicking "Edit," the corresponding product page in Shopify will open. This allows you to view the duplicate product created for the specific variation of your price test. From here, you can review product details, inventory levels, and other relevant information that pertains to your experiment.

Step 2: Remove duplicate products from third-party channels

To ensure consistent pricing visibility, limit duplicate product exposure to just your Online Store, removing them from all other channels. This prevents confusion with multiple price points appearing elsewhere.

1. Select the duplicate products in Shopify.

2. Use the menu to choose "Exclude from sales channel."

3. In the channel list, ensure Online Store remains active; deactivate all other channels.

4. Confirm by selecting "Make products unavailable" in these other channels.

Step 3: Remove duplicate products from collections

The app automatically handles removing duplicate products in manual collections, but for smart or auto-collections, a manual adjustment is necessary:

Find the liquid file that renders your collections pages. It may be called something like collection-page.liquid. Find the code block that renders each product in the collection and wrap it in the the following unless statement:

{% unless product.tags contains "elevateab" %}
 ...
{% endunless %}

In context, the code should look something like this:

{% for product in collection.products %}
   {% unless product.tags contains "elevateab" %}
      {%  
         render 'product-thumbnail',
         product: product
       %}
    {% endunless %}
{% endfor %}

For assistance or if you have questions about this process, feel free to reach out to our support team at [e-mail]

Step 4: Setup inventory tracking

To ensure precise inventory management for duplicate products used in A/B tests, it's important to adapt your inventory tracking to accommodate these duplicates. Inventory management practices vary among stores—some rely on Shopify's built-in capabilities, others use specialized apps, and some may employ alternative methods. Before implementing the following steps, evaluate the potential impact on your inventory system, especially if your products have high turnover rates or frequently sell out.

For those with rapidly changing inventory, consider utilizing a Duplicate SKU Sync App to maintain synchronized inventory levels between original and duplicate products.

Should your store utilize a third-party inventory management app, you might not need to follow these instructions. It's worth noting that apps tracking inventory by SKU generally accommodate duplicate products seamlessly since SKUs are replicated on duplicates. Conversely, apps that depend on product or variant IDs for tracking might require additional configuration to recognize duplicate items correctly. For guidance or if issues arise, please contact [e-mail]

1. Zero Out Inventory for Duplicates: Adjust the inventory quantities of all duplicate products to zero. This can be accomplished using Shopify's bulk editor feature or by accessing each product's individual Shopify page.

2. Enable Continued Selling: Activate the option to "Continue selling when out of stock" for all variants of the duplicate products, allowing sales to proceed without inventory.

If you use Shopify to track inventory, ensure to set the "Continue selling when out of stock" option back to "Stop selling when out of stock" for any original product that goes out of stock.