Picture a customer in Karachi scrolling your shop late at night. She likes a lawn kurta, but she needs a medium in sky blue. If your product page shows one photo, one price and a line that says "message us for sizes", there is a good chance she closes the tab and forgets about you by morning.
Products with choices are where online shops win or lose sales. Clothing has sizes and colours. Shoes have sizes. Bedsheets come in single and double. Phone covers come in different models. When these choices are set up clearly, customers can pick exactly what they want and pay without a single WhatsApp message. When they are set up badly, you get confused orders, refunds and angry calls.
This guide walks through how to think about sizes, colours and stock, and how to set them up in a Krobr shop.
Start with how your customer thinks
Before you open any settings, take one product and ask a simple question. What does a customer need to decide before buying it?
For a T-shirt, the answer is usually size and colour. For a perfume, it might only be the bottle size. For a set of glass jars, there may be no choice at all.
Each of these decisions is called a dimension. Size is one dimension. Colour is another. The options inside a dimension, such as Small, Medium and Large, are its values.
A few rules of thumb help here:
- Only add a dimension if it changes what you send. If every colour costs the same and you always have all of them, colour is still a real choice, so keep it. But do not add a dimension for something that is only decoration on the page.
- Keep labels short and familiar. "M" or "Medium" works. "Medium (fits 38 to 40 chest)" is better placed in the product description or a size guide.
- Use the words your customers use. If your buyers say "maroon", do not label it "burgundy" because a supplier did.
One combination, one SKU
Here is the idea that makes everything else easier. Every real combination of choices is its own sellable item. In shop language this is called a SKU.
If a kurta comes in three sizes and two colours, you have six SKUs:
| Size | Colour | Price | Stock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | Sky blue | Rs 3,200 | 4 |
| Small | Mint | Rs 3,200 | 2 |
| Medium | Sky blue | Rs 3,200 | 7 |
| Medium | Mint | Rs 3,200 | 0 |
| Large | Sky blue | Rs 3,400 | 5 |
| Large | Mint | Rs 3,400 | 3 |
This is a made-up example to show the idea.
Notice two things. First, the large size costs a little more, which is normal when it uses more fabric. Second, Medium in Mint has zero stock. A good shop should still sell every other combination while that one is shown as sold out.
In Krobr Partner, when you add dimensions to a product, the product editor creates one card for each combination automatically. Each card has its own full price (not an extra amount added on top), its own stock count, and you can give it its own SKU code and photos. The step by step guide for this screen is at /help/en/shop-variants-stock.
Setting up a product, step by step
Here is a practical order of work that saves time:
- Create the product first with its name, description and main photos. Put it in the right category so customers can find it.
- Add your first dimension, usually Size, and type its values in the order a customer expects, from smallest to largest.
- Add a second dimension only if needed, such as Colour. For colours you can add a small colour swatch so the choice is easy to recognise at a glance.
- Review the generated cards. Check that each combination exists in real life. If you never made the large size in mint, mark that card as unavailable instead of leaving it on sale.
- Set prices. If most cards share a price, use bulk edit to fill them at once, then adjust the few that differ. Look at every selected card before you save, because a bulk edit puts the same value on all of them.
- Add photos per colour. A customer who taps "Mint" should see the mint kurta. A colour that shows the wrong photo is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.
- Save, then open your public product page and click through the choices yourself. The price and photo should change as you pick.
If you are new to shop setup in general, the guide on products and collections explains categories, subcategories and collections such as "New arrivals" or "Eid edit".
Stock: count honestly, update often
Stock tracking is a switch you turn on per product. Once it is on, a combination with zero stock cannot be ordered, and if every combination of a product reaches zero, the whole product shows as out of stock. When stock tracking is off, the product is treated as always available, which suits made-to-order items.
When to track stock
Track stock for anything you hold in limited quantity, such as ready-made clothes, shoes, accessories or packaged goods. Skip it for items you make or source on demand, where the real limit is your time, not a shelf.
How to keep counts accurate
The software can only be as accurate as the numbers you give it. A few habits make a big difference:
- Do a real count before you go live.
- Remember your other sales channels. If you also sell from a physical shop, at an exhibition, or through Instagram DMs, reduce the online count when you sell offline. Otherwise you will accept an online order for a piece that left the shop an hour ago.
- Restock in the app the same day new stock arrives. A product that shows sold out when it is actually on your shelf is a lost sale you will never hear about.
- Keep a small buffer for fragile or fast items. If you know two pieces usually get damaged in handling, you can list a slightly lower number.
Low-stock alerts
When a tracked combination drops to five or fewer units after an order, Krobr can alert the owner and any team members who have permission to manage stock. Each store also has its own installable Stock app for your phone, so a team member who looks after inventory can see alerts and update counts without digging through the full store screens. The install apps guide shows how to add it to a phone.
Common mistakes and quick fixes
Too many combinations. Five sizes times eight colours is forty cards, and many may not exist. Remove values you do not actually sell, or mark impossible combinations as unavailable.
Price buried in the description. If the large size costs more, put that price on the large size card. Customers trust the price they see when they tap, not a note further down.
One photo for every colour. Even a simple phone photo of each colour on a plain background is far better than one photo for all. Our post on taking product photos with your phone has easy tips.
Renaming dimensions after launch. Changing or removing a dimension can reshape the combination cards. If you need to change one, check the prices and stock on every card before saving.
Forgetting about sold-out sizes. A sold-out size still appears so customers know the product exists. But if a product is gone for good, turn it off so customers stop hoping.
Why this effort pays off
Clear choices reduce the number of "is medium available?" messages you answer every day. They prevent the painful call where you tell a customer, after she paid by bank transfer, that her size was never in stock. And they make your shop feel like a proper store rather than a catalogue you have to ask about.
Product pages in a Krobr shop are real web pages that search engines can read, so a well named product with a clear description and good photos can also help new customers find you.
A short summary
Think about what a customer must choose, add only those dimensions, and treat each combination as its own item with its own price, photo and stock. Count your stock honestly, update it when things sell elsewhere, and let the low-stock alerts warn you before you run out. Do this for your ten best sellers first, and you will feel the difference in fewer questions and smoother orders within a week.