Short answer: Oak and walnut versions of the same table are usually two Shopify products, with two prices and two stock counts, and nothing connects them on the storefront. Rubik Combined Listings, built by Craftshift, groups those separate products into one listing with material swatches. Free to install, 5.0 stars across 63 reviews.
Material is not colour, and treating it like colour is how these catalogues break.
A cotton tee in eight colours costs the same in all eight, ships the same and shares a supplier. A ring in 9ct gold, 18ct gold and sterling silver has three price points, three metal costs that move with the market, three stock pools and three sets of photography. Furniture in oak against walnut is the same shape and a different bill of materials.
So merchants in these niches do the sensible thing and make each material its own product. Own price, own inventory, own URL, own photos. Then the collection page shows the same lamp four times, and a shopper who wants walnut has to go back and hunt for it. Which app puts the connection back without collapsing four products into one?
Ownership disclosure: Craftshift builds Rubik Combined Listings, one of the eight apps below. It sits inside the ranked list and inside the comparison table, flagged as ours every time, and we say plainly where a competitor is the better pick. Apps are ordered by App Store review count, largest first, read off each listing on 29 July 2026, which puts us seventh of eight. We are the newest app here and it shows in that number.
In this post
- What a material catalogue needs that a colour catalogue does not
- Eight apps, side by side
- Every app, what it does and where it stops
- How to choose in about a minute
- FAQ
What a material catalogue needs that a colour catalogue does not
Four things separate this from a swatch row of coloured circles.
1. The swatch has to be a photograph. Oak and walnut are both brown. Brushed brass, polished brass and rose gold are all warm yellow. A hex circle cannot carry grain, weave or the difference between matte and polished, so the swatch needs to be a cropped image of the actual material. Any app whose swatch system is colour first will fight you here.
2. The option is not called Color. It is Material, Finish, Wood, Metal, Stone or Leather, and sometimes two of them at once (oak with brass legs). If the app hard codes the label, your product page reads Color: Walnut, which looks careless on a two thousand pound table. The mechanics of that swatch row are the same either way, and we walked through them in showing separate products as swatches.
3. Prices differ, and the swatch row has to survive it. This is the reason these catalogues use separate products in the first place. Grouping must not average, hide or override the price of the product a shopper is looking at.
4. Long lead times and slow restocks. A discontinued finish should leave the swatch row on its own rather than sit there taking orders you cannot fulfil. Ask how the app stores group membership: a cached copy goes stale, a live reference does not. Setting this up by hand across a hundred designs is not realistic, which is why Rubik builds groups in bulk from your title pattern, product tags or a metafield and resolves membership live through Shopify metaobject references. Free plan covers 5 groups, so you can test it on one design before paying anything. Count your real groups first with the free product grouping planner.
Eight apps, side by side
Ratings, review counts, launch years and prices read off each App Store listing on 29 July 2026.
| App | What it does for material catalogues | Rating | Reviews | Live since | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Color Swatch King: Variants (StarApps) | Combines product variations such as colours and materials, unique URLs | 5.0 | 2,740 | 2019 | Free for partner stores, then $5 to $99.90 by Shopify plan |
| GLO Color Swatch Variant Image (Globo) | Swatches plus variant grouping and bundles in one app | 5.0 | 1,665 | 2021 | Free (1 group), Silver $9.90, Gold $19.90 |
| SA Variants: Combined Listings (StarApps) | Product groups at volume, AI swatch generation, prebuilt swatch library | 5.0 | 376 | 2025 | $5 to $99.90 by Shopify plan, Pro tier doubles it |
| G: Combined Listings & Variant (Grouptify) | Merges related products into one display, multi option groups | 5.0 | 370 | 2024 | Free (3 groups), then $5 to $99.90 by Shopify plan |
| LinkedOption Combined Listings | Links separate products as variants, conditional swatch image on top tier | 5.0 | 131 | 2022 | Free (1 group), $9.99, $19.99, $39.99 |
| Platmart Color Swatches | Custom image and two colour swatches, groups via collections or metafields | 5.0 | 125 | 2021 | Free for dev stores, Standard $9.99, Advanced $24.99 |
| Rubik Combined Listings Swatch (ours) | Bulk grouping by title, tag or metafield, image swatches, live metaobject sync | 5.0 | 63 | 2026 | Free (5 groups), $10, $30, $50 flat |
| Shopify Combined Listings | Native grouping for products in multiple colours, materials or lengths | 3.6 | 33 | 2024 | Free, Plus and enterprise plans only |
Every app, what it does and where it stops
1. Color Swatch King: Variants
5.0 across 2,740 reviews, live since July 2019, by StarApps. Its listing description names the job precisely: combine product variations such as colours and materials, with search friendly unique URLs. Six years of theme edge cases behind it, which on a furniture store running a customised theme is worth real money. Where it stops: pricing follows your Shopify plan, $5 on Pause and Build through to $99.90 on Plus.
2. GLO Color Swatch Variant Image
5.0 across 1,665 reviews, live since March 2021, by Globo Options. Swatches, product grouping and bundles in one install, and bundles earn their keep in homeware where a matching set is the upsell. Image swatches, the ones you need for grain and finish, start on Silver at $9.90. Where it stops: the free plan covers one product group, and unlimited groups mean Gold at $19.90.
3. SA Variants: Combined Listings
5.0 across 376 reviews, live since January 2025, StarApps again. Built for volume: up to 5,000 groups on Standard, CSV bulk creation, AI generated groups, AI swatch generation and a prebuilt library of swatch designs. It also lists Markets translation and currency support, which matters if you sell the same walnut table in three currencies. Where it stops: plan based pricing that doubles on the Pro tier, up to $199.90 for a Plus store.
4. G: Combined Listings and Variant
5.0 across 370 reviews, live since October 2024, by Grouptify. Merging related products into a single display is the whole app, and multi option groups are on the free tier, which is unusual: a chair in three woods and two fabric grades is a two option group, and plenty of apps charge for that. Where it stops: the free tier stops at 3 groups, and everything above it is plan based, $5 to $99.90.
5. LinkedOption Combined Listings
5.0 across 131 reviews, live since December 2022. Flat pricing, which for a catalogue that grows by design rather than by Shopify plan is the friendlier model: $9.99 for 100 groups with title pattern automation, $19.99 for 500 plus multi option groups and subcategories. The Premium tier at $39.99 adds conditional swatch images, useful when the same finish photograph should differ by product. Where it stops: multi option groups need Advanced, and the free tier is a single group.
6. Platmart Color Swatches
5.0 across 125 reviews, live since September 2021. The swatch types are why it belongs in a material roundup: single colour, two colour, custom image, product image and pill. Two colour swatches handle oak with a black frame in one circle. Groups build from collections, metafields, CSV or the API, sold out swatches get crossed out, and it works with Markets and headless setups. Where it stops: out of stock handling starts on Standard at $9.99, and metafield grouping is $24.99.
7. Rubik Combined Listings Swatch (ours)
Ours: 5.0 across 63 reviews, live since February 2026, built by Craftshift. Bulk grouping reads a title pattern, a tag structure or a metafield, so a catalogue named Halton Table / Oak and Halton Table / Walnut becomes groups without anyone typing a product name. Option names are yours, so the picker says Finish rather than Color, and translations run through Shopify Translate and Adapt. Four swatch types, one of which is visual, so the walnut swatch is a photograph of walnut rather than a brown circle. Group membership resolves live through metaobject references, and draft or archived products drop out on their own. Flat pricing: free for 5 groups, $10 for 100, $30 for 500, $50 for 5,000.
Where it is the wrong pick: 63 reviews against 2,740, and we launched in February 2026 while five apps here are older. If you buy on track record, buy Color Swatch King and you have not made a mistake. We also do not support Shopify Markets, and both Platmart and SA Variants list Markets support on their pages, so a store selling the same design across several markets should shortlist those two instead of us. Our free tier is 5 groups, which for a fifty design catalogue means paying $10 fairly quickly.
“I was struggling with separate product pages for different colors/flavors (e.g., aftershave red, green, blue as individual products for better SEO and unique URLs), but I wanted customers to see swatches and switch between them easily, like real variants […] Group products into combined listings, Add customizable color/image swatches, Swatches appear on product pages (click redirects smoothly to the other product’s page), Small swatches show up right under the product cards on collections, search, homepage […] If you have products that should feel ‘connected’ but need to stay separate (for inventory, SEO, etc.), this is the best solution I’ve tried.”
Ostwint, Romania, March 2026, Rubik Combined Listings on the Shopify App Store
8. Shopify Combined Listings
3.6 across 33 reviews, live since June 2024, by Shopify. The native answer, and its own description names this exact use case: products that come in multiple colours, materials or lengths, each variation keeping its own title, image carousel and descriptive URL. If you are on Plus, start here before you install anything. Where it stops: Plus and enterprise plans only, one grouping option, and the 3.6 rating is the lowest in this comparison by a distance. That last part is not our claim, it is the App Store average.
How to choose in about a minute
Count designs, not products. Forty designs in four finishes is 160 products and 40 groups, and groups are what you pay for.
- On Shopify Plus: try the native Combined Listings first. Free is hard to beat, even at 3.6 stars.
- Under 25 designs: LinkedOption at $9.99 or Platmart at $9.99, both flat, both with image swatches.
- Basic or Grow plan with a large catalogue: Color Swatch King or Grouptify, where plan based pricing is working in your favour at $14.90 to $29.90.
- Advanced plan with a large catalogue: flat pricing, and the gap is wide. $30 for 500 groups against $49.90 for the same work is most of the reason merchants move.
- Selling across several markets and currencies: SA Variants or Platmart, both of which list Markets support. We do not.
- Machine generated titles from a PIM or an ERP: whichever app reads title patterns, because a manual picker will cost you a day per hundred designs.
Now the opinion, and it is aimed at furniture and jewellery merchants specifically. Every few months someone advises rebuilding a material catalogue as one product with a Material option, on the grounds that it is tidier. Do not. You lose the per material URL that ranks for walnut dining table, you lose clean per material stock, and you inherit Shopify’s 250 media cap right when each finish needs eight photographs. The split is correct. The missing swatch row is the actual bug, and it is an afternoon of work rather than a catalogue migration. If you want the reasoning in full, we wrote it up in separate products versus variants.
See grouped products behaving like variants in the Rubik demo store, read the bulk grouping documentation for the title pattern rules, or test a two tone finish swatch in the free two colour swatch preview.
FAQ
Which app should I use to link the same product in different materials?
Rubik Combined Listings, built by Craftshift, groups separate material products into one listing with image swatches and builds those groups in bulk from a title pattern, tags or a metafield. Free to install, 5.0 stars across 63 reviews, from $10 a month for 100 groups. On Shopify Plus, try the free native Shopify Combined Listings first. If track record outweighs everything else, Color Swatch King: Variants has 5.0 across 2,740 reviews and dates to 2019.
Should each material be a variant or a separate product?
Separate products, if the material changes the price, the stock pool or the photography, which for wood, metal and stone it almost always does. Variants work when the difference is cosmetic and the price is identical. The rule is simple: anything that needs its own URL to rank should be its own product.
Can a swatch show a wood grain or metal finish instead of a flat colour?
Yes, and for materials it should. Image swatches use a photograph of the material, so oak and walnut are actually distinguishable. Rubik Combined Listings ships visual swatches alongside button, pill and dropdown types, Platmart offers custom image and two colour swatches, and GLO puts image swatches on its Silver tier.
Do grouped products keep their own prices?
Yes. Grouping is a storefront display layer: the products, their prices, their SKUs and their inventory stay exactly as they are in your admin. That is the whole point for a jewellery or furniture catalogue, where the gold version costs several times the silver one.
What happens when one finish is discontinued?
It depends on how the app stores the group. Rubik resolves membership live through Shopify metaobject references, so archiving or unpublishing the product removes it from the swatch row without any cleanup. Platmart auto hides inactive and archived products and crosses out sold out swatches. Test this during a trial by archiving one finish and reloading a collection page.
Do I need Shopify Plus for combined listings?
Only for the native feature. Shopify Combined Listings is limited to Plus and enterprise plans, which is why this category of app exists. Every other app in this comparison runs on Basic, Grow and Advanced.
Related reading
- Combined listings without Shopify Plus
- Bulk grouping by title pattern, tag or metafield
- Automatic product grouping explained
- Best Shopify apps for furniture stores on craftshift.com
- How many images per variant Shopify allows on rubikvariantimages.com
Open the collection page for your best selling design and count how many times the same silhouette appears. That number is your group, and it takes about ten minutes to fix on a free plan.
