How Product Families Work
Access requirements. Same access as the Product list — there's no separate permission for any of this.
A "family" is a product, not a new concept. Every family is the same parent product record you already work with elsewhere, just referred to at the family level when talking about shared attributes (brand, style, ABV, region, vintage) instead of size/pack-specific details.
Distinct from a Department. A department groups many unrelated families together for pricing/tax/margin defaults. A product family groups only the variants of one specific item. These are two different levels of organization — don't confuse them.
There used to be a dedicated "Product Families" page. It's gone. It caused confusion for merchants, so it was removed — its bulk-edit capabilities now live directly on the main Products list instead.
Bulk-editing shared attributes got more capable. Brand, supplier, country, and region can all be bulk-edited straight from the Products list now. Brand and supplier are new — they weren't bulk-editable before.
Division is bulk-editable too, but only across items that share a distributor. Trying to bulk-edit division for a mixed-distributor selection returns an error instead of applying inconsistently.
Adding a new size or pack to an existing item is more forgiving now. If what you're creating is genuinely new (a different container or size than anything that item already has), it attaches to the existing product automatically — you no longer have to create it separately and then merge. Creating an exact duplicate of something that already exists still errors, pointing you to the existing line instead.
Renaming a product into a collision now offers a merge, not just an error. If you rename something to a name that already exists, you get a one-click option to merge the two together instead of just being blocked.
Where to Access Each Feature
To… | Go to |
Bulk-edit brand, supplier, country, or region | Products list → select rows → bulk edit |
Bulk-edit division | Products list → select rows sharing one distributor → bulk edit → Division |
See which family a variant belongs to | Products list "Product family" column, or the item drawer |
Merge two families together | A product's drawer → rename it to an existing product's name |
Bulk-Editing Family Attributes
Step 1
On the Products list, select the rows you want to update.
Step 2
Open the bulk-edit action and choose the field: Brand, Supplier, Country, or Region.
Step 3
Enter the new value and confirm. This applies to every selected product's family-level attribute at once.
Bulk-Editing Division
Division lives on the distributor relationship, so it has one extra rule: everything you select has to share a distributor.
Step 4
Select rows that all share the same distributor. A mixed-distributor selection returns an error — "Selected items don't share a distributor. Division can only be bulk edited for items that share one."
Step 5
Open bulk edit, choose Division, and pick from the divisions available for that shared distributor.
Step 6
Confirm.
Seeing Which Family a Variant Belongs To
Step 7
On the Products list grid, look for the "Product family" column.
Step 8
Or open the item's drawer — its family-level attributes (brand, style, ABV, region) show alongside its own variant-specific fields.
Adding a New Size or Pack to an Existing Item
Step 9
Create the new item as usual — same name, same brand, whatever's different about this one (say, a 12-ounce bottle where the existing product only has a 6-pack).
Step 10
If it's genuinely new, it attaches to the existing product automatically — you'll see "Added to existing product" instead of "Product created."
If you instead try to create something that's an exact match for a container/size that product already has, you'll get an error telling you it already exists and pointing you to edit the existing line rather than creating a duplicate.
Merging Two Families
Step 11
Open the drawer for the product you want to merge, and rename it to exactly match the target product's name.
Step 12
Try to save. You'll see a "name already taken" message along with a "Merge into [name]" option.
Step 13
Click it and confirm. The renamed product's variants move onto the existing product, and the now-empty duplicate is discarded.
Troubleshooting
Looking for the old "Product Families" page. It's gone — everything it did is now built directly into the main Products list and the product drawer.
Division bulk edit failed with "Selected items don't share a distributor." Narrow your selection to items on the same distributor and try again.
Created what should have been a new size and got an error instead of it attaching automatically. Check whether what you tried to create is an exact match (same container type and size) for something that item already has — that's treated as a duplicate, not a new size. Edit the existing line instead of creating a new one.
Renamed a product by accident and now see an unwanted merge prompt. Don't click Merge — just change the name to something that doesn't collide, or back out the rename.
The same item shows as two separate products/families. If this predates the rename-merge flow, there's no automatic fix — rename one to exactly match the other's name to trigger the merge prompt, or contact Scotch support.