A product is the thing you sell. A variant is the version a buyer actually picks, and the variant carries the price. A product with no variants cannot be bought, and every price question comes back to a variant.
Variants are edited inside the product, under Products in the left-hand menu.
What a variant holds
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | What the buyer picks — "Large", "Annual", "Up to 10 users". |
| Price | The base price. How it is used depends on the pricing mode below. |
| Pricing mode | Flat or Allowance. This is the important one. |
| Unit label | What one of something is called — seat, licence, ticket, shirt. Used in the wording a buyer sees. |
| Min / max quantity | The smallest and largest a buyer may order in one go. |
| Interval | Leave empty for a one-off purchase. Set it to bill again on a schedule. |
| Collect fields per unit | Ask for details about each individual unit rather than once for the order. |
| Tax | Follow the store tax rate, or override it just for this variant. |
| Collection fee | Follow the store collection fee, or override it just for this variant. |
Flat pricing
The price is per unit, and the buyer pays for every one. This is what you want for physical things and simple purchases.
Total = price × quantity. A shirt at $45 with 3 ordered is $135.
Allowance pricing
The price buys a bundle with a number of units already included, and anything beyond that is charged separately. This is what you want for seats, licences and mailboxes — anywhere a plan includes a few and extras cost more.
Total = price + (quantity − included) × overage price, and the second part is never negative.
| Setting | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Price | The cost of the bundle itself, however few units are used. |
| Included quantity | How many units the bundle covers before extras are charged. |
| Overage price | What each unit beyond the included quantity costs. |
A plan priced at $100 including 5 seats, with $15 per extra seat:
| Seats used | Charged | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | $100 | Under the included 5. The bundle price still applies in full. |
| 5 | $100 | Exactly the included amount. Nothing extra. |
| 8 | $145 | $100 for the bundle, plus 3 extra seats at $15. |
Subscriptions
Setting an interval on a variant turns it into a subscription: the buyer is charged now, and again each interval, until it is cancelled. Leave the interval empty and the product is a one-off purchase.
Both pricing modes work with an interval. An allowance variant billed monthly re-prices at each renewal against the seats in use at that moment, so a tribe that added seats mid-month pays for them from the next renewal.
Per-unit details
Turn on Collect fields per unit when you need information about each individual unit rather than the order as a whole — the email address for each licence, the name and size for each shirt, the dietary requirement for each dinner seat. The buyer is asked once per unit at checkout, and the answers appear against each entry in the Register.
Leave it off and you ask once for the whole order, which is right for things like a delivery address.
Tax and collection fees on a variant
Both normally follow the store settings, and both can be overridden on a single variant when it genuinely differs — a zero-rated item in an otherwise taxed store, for example. Override only when you have to: a variant that quietly uses a different rate is hard to spot later when a total looks wrong.
Changing a price
Editing a variant price changes what new buyers pay. Orders already placed keep the price they were charged.