The difference between a custom option and traditional options or variants is small from a customer perspective, but technically significant. In this guide, you will learn how to create custom options for products in AI Commerce e-commerce platform, how they differ from regular options and variants, and how they appear on the order. This way, you can get more flexible additional options for your products without affecting price, inventory, or SKU.

What is the difference between a custom option and an option or variant?

Options and variants usually affect the availability, price or SKU of a product. For example, you can create your own SKU and inventory management for different material and size combinations. Custom options do not affect these values, but only provide additional information for the order.

Example: If you sell road signs, you can create combinations (variants and/or options) for dimensions and materials that affect SKU and stock availability. In addition, you can add custom options such as color and font, which are additional information but do not change the product's stock information.

If you want to create choices that change the price or directly affect inventory, use regular options or variants. There is a separate article about them in our knowledge base.

Step-by-step guide: How to create a custom option

1. First, go to the catalog by searching for the desired product: open “Catalog” and select the product you want to add custom options to.
2. On the product card, select “Custom options”. On the new page, click “Add new custom option”.
3. First, choose a value for the option. You can use the same values that regular options use. If you need completely new options, they are created on the “Products” and “Options” pages. (See a separate article on creating options.)
4. Enter a title and select an “Input type”, for example “Radiobutton” or “Checkbox”.
   • “Radio Button” forces you to select one option.
   • “Checkbox” allows you to select multiple options.
5. Set the “Sort order”. If you want the selection to be mandatory, check the “Required” box.
6. If necessary, specify multiple values (e.g. “black”, “blue”) and give them sequential numbers.
7. Save your changes. The product now displays an additional selection field that does not affect the product's price, availability, or SKU.

What happens to the order?

Custom options information is always transferred to the product's additional comment field when ordering. Since most ERP systems support additional comment fields, the order processor will also see this selected additional information in ERP.

Additional tip: Conditional selections

If necessary, you can make a custom option mandatory or leave it up to the customer to decide. For example, if you sell a product that can be customized in many ways, but not all choices are mandatory, you can leave some of the custom options optional.

Summary

Custom options are a convenient way to collect additional information from the customer without directly affecting price, inventory, or SKU. They are ideal for providing additional choices alongside product variants or options when you want to offer the customer the ability to refine the ordered product, but you don't need separate inventory-managed versions.