What Optivo does
Optivo lets customers personalise a product — an engraving, a fabric, a delivery date, or gift wrapping — and lets you charge for those choices, without creating a single Shopify product variant.
Why “without variants” matters
Section titled “Why “without variants” matters”Shopify’s built-in options work by creating a variant for every combination. Three colours, four sizes and two finishes is 24 variants. Add a text field and the model breaks down entirely, because there is no finite list of engravings to enumerate.
Optivo stores a customer’s choices as line item properties on the cart line instead. That means:
- Your variant count does not change, no matter how many options you add.
- Your inventory, SKUs and existing reporting stay exactly as they are.
- Free-text and dates are possible — there is no variant that could represent them.
Price changes are applied at checkout by a Shopify Function, so the customer is charged correctly without a variant standing in for the price.
What you can build
Section titled “What you can build”| 20 option types | Dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes, colour and image swatches in single and multiple selection, text fields, text areas, numbers, sliders, dates, date-and-time, pattern-checked custom fields — plus headings, paragraphs, dividers and HTML blocks for laying a long set out. See Choosing a type. |
| 5 pricing rules | Flat fee, percentage of product price, per character typed, a formula, or quantity tiers. See How pricing works. |
| Conditional logic | Show, hide, require or un-require one option based on the answer to another. See Show and hide options. |
| Flexible assignment | Apply a set to one product, a collection, a tag, a product type, a vendor, or every product. See Assigning to products. |
How the pieces fit together
Section titled “How the pieces fit together”- You build an option set — a named group of options — in the Optivo admin.
- You assign it to the products it applies to.
- You publish it. Publishing is what sends the pricing configuration to Shopify.
- The app embed renders the fields on your product pages.
- At checkout, a Shopify Function applies the price adjustments.
Steps 3 and 4 are the two that catch people out. An unpublished set never reaches the storefront, and the app embed ships switched off — see Install and turn it on.
What Optivo does not do
Section titled “What Optivo does not do”- It does not create or modify product variants. This is deliberate and permanent.
- It does not edit your theme’s files. Everything renders through Shopify’s app embed mechanism, so uninstalling leaves nothing behind. See Uninstalling.
- It does not work on vintage themes. App embeds require an Online Store 2.0 theme.
Start with Install and turn it on, then Build your first option set.