What is a product variation?
A product variation is one version of a product, such as a size, colour or flavour, with its own price, SKU and stock count.
Many products come in versions. A T-shirt comes in S, M and L and in three colours. A pizza comes in 10, 12 and 16 inch. A bag of coffee comes in 340 g and 1 kg. Rather than set up nine separate T-shirt products, a POS stores one product with variations, and each variation carries its own price, SKU or barcode, and stock level.
Variations are built from attributes (also called templates or groups). Size is one attribute with values S, M, L; Colour is another with values red, blue, black. Combining them gives the full list of variations. Keep the list to what you actually stock; nine combinations you never carry only clutter the screen.
The payoff is in reports and stock. Because each variation has its own stock count, you can see that medium blue sells out every week while large red sits. And because they share one parent product, sales roll up so you can also see how the T-shirt sells overall. A variation differs from a modifier, which is an add-on or instruction that does not change which version was sold.
In SeroPOS you build Variation Groups (for example Size or Color) in the app's Admin or Variations in the back office, then set the product type to 'With variations' (Variable in the back office) and fill in each variation's price. At the till, tapping the product opens Select Variation ('Choose a size or option'). In QSR Mode each variation can become its own button, such as 'Burger - L'.
A tee is set up with Size (S, M, L) and Colour (Black, White): six variations. Each has a SKU such as TEE-BLK-M and its own price ($24.00 for S and M, $26.00 for L) and stock count. After a month, Black M has sold 40 and White L has sold 3, so the next order shifts toward black.