Colour swatches, not a dropdown
A shopper should be able to see every colour you sell without opening a menu. Vensa puts real swatches on your product pages and your collection cards, reading the colours you have already set in Shopify.
Two places shoppers decide
Most swatch apps only cover the product page. By then the shopper has already scrolled past a collection of grey thumbnails and picked the one product they will look at.
A full picker, in your theme
- Every option can have its own style, so Colour can be swatches while Size stays a dropdown
- Out of stock values can be struck through, hidden, or left alone
- An optional stock line under the picker, for example: Only 3 left in stock
- Sold out states and prices keep coming from your theme, not from us
Compact chips on the cards
- Chips sit under the price on each product card
- Clicking one swaps the card image, or opens that variant, your choice
- Show between three and eight chips per card, so a 40 colour product does not take over the grid
- Also runs on the related products row of a product page
No flash of the old dropdown
Most swatch apps run as JavaScript after the page loads. The shopper sees the theme dropdown for a moment, then it is replaced. On a fast laptop nobody notices. On a mid range phone on mobile data, it is a visible jump, and it happens on every product page.
Vensa renders the product page swatches inside the theme itself, in Liquid, so they are in the HTML that arrives from Shopify. The rule that hides the theme picker loads in the page head. There is nothing to swap in later, because nothing was wrong to begin with.
And if something does go wrong: a failsafe brings your theme picker back after two seconds if our script never runs. A shopper on a theme we have never seen gets your normal product page. They never get a broken one.
Eleven styles, six shapes
Set a style per option, not per store. Colour becomes swatches, Size becomes buttons, Length becomes a dropdown, all on the same product.
Swatches
- Colour swatch
- Image swatch
- Variant image, the real fabric photo
- Polaroid, image card with a caption
- Swatch in a pill, dot plus name
Buttons
- Buttons
- Button pill
- Button with no border
- Button with price per value
Dropdowns
- Dropdown, good for Size
- Dropdown with colour chips inside
It already knows your colours
The setup most merchants dread is telling an app what colour Oatmeal is, four hundred times.
Your own Shopify swatches
If you have set native option value swatches in Shopify, those are used as they are. They are your real colours, so they always beat a guess.
A built in colour dictionary
Anything still unmapped is matched against a dictionary that covers English and Vietnamese colour names, including the ones with a marketing name.
Listed, never guessed
Values it is not sure about stay unmapped and appear in a list for you to fix, in the app or by CSV import. Deleted mappings are recoverable for 30 days.
The catalogue re syncs on its own when you edit a product, so a new colour shows up without you opening the app.
One style sold as five listings
Plenty of stores list each colour as its own product, because of photography, inventory, or because that is how the supplier sends it. The shopper who lands on the black one has no idea the green one exists.
Group those listings in the app and they get one swatch row that navigates between them. Your products keep their own options, their own inventory and their own URLs. Nothing is merged and nothing is rewritten.
Also in the app
- A missing images list, showing which variants have no photo of their own
- CSV import and export of every colour mapping
- A live preview of the product page and the collection card while you edit
- Per option control of which values appear on collection cards
Questions
Does it replace my theme's variant picker?
No. The app hides the theme picker and drives it, so your theme keeps handling the actual variant selection, cart behaviour and price updates. If the app cannot drive a picker it has never seen, it reveals the theme picker again and gets out of the way.
Will shoppers see the old dropdown flash before the swatches appear?
Not on the product page. The swatches are rendered by the theme app block in Liquid, so they are already in the HTML on first paint. The CSS that hides the theme picker loads in the head for the same reason.
Do I have to map every colour by hand?
Usually not. The catalogue sync reads the native option value swatches you already set in Shopify, then fills the rest from a built in colour dictionary. Anything it is unsure about stays unmapped and is listed for you, so nothing is guessed silently.
What happens on collection pages?
A separate app embed adds compact chips to product cards on collection, search and home pages, and to the related products row on product pages. Clicking a chip either swaps the card image or opens that variant, whichever you choose.
I sell the same style as separate products, one listing per colour. Can it link them?
Yes. Product Grouping links separate listings into one swatch row, so a shopper on the red listing can click through to the blue one. It is configured in the app and does not touch your product options.
Is it really free?
Yes, the app has no paid plan. It is part of the Vensa suite and the other apps are how the suite pays for itself.
Free, and it stays free
There is no paid tier to upgrade to. Install it, run the catalogue sync, and see how your collection pages look with colour on them.
Install free on Shopify