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Group products into families

Confirm a product family as the parent of its SKUs, share one FAQ and thumbnail across the members, and publish a whole family in one pass.

4 min readintermediateUpdated November 3, 2026

A store with hundreds of SKUs usually sells far fewer real products. A family groups the SKUs that are really one product, such as the sizes of a single Northgate ESD Packaging insert, so you write the shared answers once instead of once per SKU.

What a family is

A confirmed family is the parent of its member products. It owns two things:

  • One shared FAQ. Every member inherits it. A member can add questions of its own, and the FAQ that is published for that product is the combined list: the family questions first, then the product's own. If a product repeats a family question, the family version is kept.
  • One thumbnail. A family has a single representative image.

Each SKU still keeps its own title, description, and specifications. Families do not create a new product in your store and do not rewrite the store's own parent and variant structure.

Review family candidates

Forge proposes candidates from repeatable evidence such as parent links, SKU patterns, and canonical URLs. A person confirms them. Forge never confirms a family on its own.

  1. Open AEO & Agentic Storefronts > Products.
  2. Open the actions menu and choose Review Families.
  3. Select Sync Catalog & Refresh if the list looks stale. Check the Sync Result line for how many products and candidates were re-derived.
  4. For each candidate, read the badge, the member count, and the Evidence line.
  5. Select Confirm to make it a parent, or Reject to dismiss it.

The three review tools:

  • Confirm turns a candidate into a parent family.
  • Merge Selected combines several families. Pick them in Families to merge, enter a Merged display name, and merge.
  • Split Family appears on an ambiguous family, where Confirm is disabled. In Split groups, list product IDs separated by commas and use | between the groups you want to separate, then split.

An ambiguous family means Forge found conflicting evidence. Split or merge it until each group is one product, then confirm.

Import a SKU-to-parent mapping

When you already know which SKUs belong together, import the mapping instead of reviewing candidates.

  1. On Product Families, select Import Mapping.
  2. Paste CSV text into Mapping CSV, or choose a .csv file.
  3. Use a header row with one product column, either external_id or sku, and one family column, either family_id or family_key.
  4. Select Import Mapping and read the Save Result.

Each product may appear once. The target family must already be a confirmed parent. The result reports how many products were assigned and lists any unknown products and unknown families. Forge never guesses a match: a SKU that matches more than one product is reported as unknown.

Edit the family FAQ and pick a thumbnail

Both controls are on each family card.

  1. Select Family FAQ.
  2. Edit the Questions and Answers (JSON) list. Each item has a q and an a, for example {"q": "What sizes are available?", "a": "..."}.
  3. Select Save Draft.

To set the thumbnail, select Pick Thumbnail, then either choose one of the images from the family's member products or enter an HTTPS Image URL, and save.

Saving a family FAQ or thumbnail stores a draft in Forge. It does not change your storefront.

Publish by family

  1. Open Manage Bulk Drafts from the Products actions menu.
  2. In Publish by Family, choose the family.
  3. Tick the fields to write. The list includes faq and specs.
  4. Select Publish Selected Fields.
  5. Open Publish Results and check each product.

The action covers every product in the family that has a saved draft. Products without a draft, or whose draft fails validation, show as Failed with a reason and the others still publish. One audit entry records the per-product results. Publishing needs administrator permission; operators can prepare drafts but not publish them.

Troubleshooting

The family is ambiguous and Confirm is greyed out. Use Split Family or Merge Selected first.

An import lists unknown products. The external_id or sku does not match one product in the connected storefront. Check for typos, run Sync Catalog & Refresh, and import only the failed rows again.

An import lists unknown families. The family is not a confirmed parent yet. Confirm it first, or use its exact family_id.

A product shows children inherit (0). The family has no saved FAQ yet, so there is nothing to inherit. Add one with Family FAQ.

A family is missing from Publish by Family. Only confirmed parent families are listed.

Your work is done when each real product is one confirmed family, its FAQ and thumbnail are saved, and the publish results show every member as published. Check a product page on the store before you tell anyone it is live.