I’ve been customizing my Shopify store using the debut theme and ran into a frustrating problem. When customers browse through products on my collection pages, I want them to see color options for each item.
The color variants show up fine, but here’s the weird part - when someone clicks on a color swatch for any product, it only updates the main image of the very first product in the list. So if there are 10 products showing and you click the blue option on product #5, the first product’s image changes instead.
This is really confusing for customers and I can’t figure out what’s causing it. Has anyone dealt with something similar before? I’m pretty sure it’s a JavaScript targeting issue but I’m not experienced enough to debug it properly.
I encountered this exact problem when working with the Debut theme last year. The issue stems from how the JavaScript handles variant selection across multiple products on collection pages. Each product card needs unique identifiers, but the theme’s default code often uses generic selectors that target the first matching element instead of the specific product. What worked for me was modifying the variant selection script to use product-specific IDs rather than class names. You’ll need to locate the JavaScript file handling variant changes (usually in the assets folder) and update the selectors to include the product ID in the targeting logic. Also check if your product cards have unique wrapper IDs - without them, the script can’t differentiate between products. The fix requires some template editing too, ensuring each product card generates unique identifiers for the variant selectors. It’s a common oversight in theme customization that causes this cross-product interference.
This happens because the variant selection event listeners are getting mixed up between product cards. I had a similar headache with Debut theme about 6 months ago. The root cause is usually in the collection template where the variant picker JavaScript isn’t properly scoped to individual products. Check your collection-template.liquid file and look for how the variant selectors are being initialized. Most likely there’s a forEach loop or similar that’s supposed to create separate instances for each product, but it’s failing to bind the correct product context. What fixed mine was ensuring the variant change function receives the correct product handle or ID as a parameter, then using that to target the specific product’s image container. You might also want to inspect the browser console when clicking variants to see if there are any JavaScript errors being thrown. Sometimes there’s a missing product object or undefined variable that breaks the proper targeting. The debugging process can be tedious but start by adding some console.log statements to trace which product the script thinks it’s updating.