It would be good if we could show variants as are in category sections but with options to show as separate also and to only show separate.
This can allow quicker selection of a colour by a customer - look for say only an unusual colour rather than going into each product to find out.
yes there are way to do this with additional categories but customers tend to buy off images and some are to impossible to categorise - polka dot red/green/blue versus polka dot black/grey/yellow. But 2 images and done.
Then if a variant was chosen when it was being shown in the category section on its own it would bring up the normal box that we currently have which shows the variants
The idea would also allow an emptyish category to be beefed up a bit.
This seems similar to Snorocket’s “Shop by feature” addon except that you suggest using the options variants. Can you explain how that would work? If two products have the same variant, would the variant picture be shown once for each product or would the products be collected under the same variant picture? If the latter, would this work for variants that are not global options?
Maybe this should be done using product features instead. You could create a block(s) specifying which feature to display and other display parameters. The feature variant images could be displayed on a category (or any other) page and, when clicked, would list all the products with that feature variant set. You would be able to choose which block(s) to include on the category page using the existing “Blocks” functionality. This should allow for displaying any feature with “extended” attributes. Most of this is already there - I think you would just need to add the ability to display the features as images instead of links.
Bob