Product Options in Big Commerce

Today I worked on understanding Product Options in Big Commerce. This became an issue because I have so many levels of categories in my Speed and Agility Section. If I consolidated my lower levels into a higher level, then it leaves 100 or more products in one category and it seems like a lot for people to go through.

You can see that under CanDo Adjustable Exercise Band Systems, I have 18 products directlky underneight, but 237 sub category products. When I looked at those products they were mostly 10 or 12 products with additional options. For example:

In this section, all these products are the same item, but its a different thickness level (and color) So I can have 1 item that adjusts color and fitness level That would clean up my store a LOT.

So I learned how to do options. Here's the video of how to do product options on BigCommerce

I also learned something else about Options. Here are the pros and cons. 

Pros: Cleans up the store. Likely makes it easier for customers to choose a base product and then select options (Imagine having to look through a store for a jacket and having to rummage through 20 colors, 5 sizes, and 3 materials. That's 300 different products.) Instead its easier for the customer to choose 1 product : Jacket. Then they choose the size : Medium  (Now its narrowed to 60 products) Then they choose the Color: Blue (Now they have 3 product choices for a Medium Blue Jacket. They have 3 material choices)  

Con: I learned that Big Commerce doesn't have a google shopping integration that includes options. You have to use another service and most of them cost. Only the main product will show up on Google Shopping. So if you want each variation to show up on google shopping, you need separate products or would need to use an additional platform. (I haven't looked into that yet) 

Unknown pro or con: If you have each variation with a unique product description. I've done that on a lot of my products, then each product helps you to rank for those key terms because its more content. But its really hard and time consuming to come up with 200 variations for the same product. Plus at what point to you start to sound spammy to google? Does having different products help you rank on google shopping? If I have Blue Jacked Large, Blue Jacket Med, Blue Jacket Small- Can I rand for Blue Jacket with each of my pages and take up most of the page 1 options?  (I don't know the answer to this question) Its worth thinking about though. 

Resources for Big Commerce Options: These are videos and articles by Big Commerce.
https://support.bigcommerce.com/articles/Public/Product-Option-Types
https://support.bigcommerce.com/articles/University/Product-Options-Getting-Started-Video/
https://support.bigcommerce.com/articles/Public/Product-Options-Product-List/?q=product+listing&l=en_US&fs=Search&pn=1
https://support.bigcommerce.com/articles/Public/Product-Options-Rules/?q=product+rule&l=en_US&fs=Search&pn=1#image

Here are the list of MultiChannel Apps for the Options to integrate
https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/