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Thanks for the answers!

23 hours ago, Dreamtheme said:

Why do you want to show the same product as different ones? Even if you figure a way to do it, this is terrible for customer experience and many users will be confused.

I'm going to mostly sell window blinds and fabric's colour is the most important feature along with the level of blackout the fabric gives. I came to the conclusion that I will probably just add different colours as separate products and use canonical urls to avoid duplicate content. There are a few reasons why I want to do it this way:

1. The price of a window blind depends on the type of fabric (different price table for each fabric). Some fabrics are in 30-40 different colours. If I put all colours as attributes into one product then I would have to choose one of them as the main picture on category pages (I know there are colour snippets but it just doesn't look good this way).

20 hours ago, musicmaster said:

So why don't you make color a feature? You can use features for filtering.

2. If I have 30 colours of a product then how can I use features for colours? I would either have to put all of them into one long feature or make 30 features for each colour. Most colours are present in every fabric (at least the most popular ones, like white, black, gray etc.) with sometimes just a different shade. Either way using filtering would almost always result in showing all products anyway. However, If I put colours as separate products then you could easily filter through them.

3. If a customer is looking only for a specific colour (and they usually do from my experience), they would have to go through all the pictures in the gallery on products page (sometimes 30-40 pictures) to see the window blind made from that fabric. However, if it's done 'my way', they can just filter e.g. "gray" on category page and they will see all gray blinds from every collection of fabric. I think this is actually better for customer experience - you can find the exact colour you are looking for much faster.

4. I try to follow the example of big and successful shops that sell window blinds in my country and most of them have done it this way.

5. The amount of pictures in product page gallery. I have to have a picture of a window blind made in every colour - this is a must, just fabric samples are not enough. Some window blinds (e.g. roman roller blinds) can be sewn in two or three different ways which largely alter the blind's look and I have pictures for that in every colour as well. Following previous example, that would make 60-90 pictures in the gallery. Besides the 'main' picture of a window blind, I would like to upload some other pictures, like close-ups which would raise the total number of pictures in the gallery to.. well, it would be too much. I want to avoid putting pictures in product's description to make the website load faster. Also, wouldn't uploading that many pictures into product's gallery make the website load slower anyway?

These are the main reasons for doing it the 'weird' way, I would appreciate any feedback on that.