By default, swatches behave like radio buttons. One value is always pre-selected when a customer lands on the product page. Some merchants prefer that customers make an active choice rather than land on a pre-selected value.
There are two ways to handle this, depending on what you want customers to experience.
Option 1: Keep standard swatches and add a required field prompt
If you want to keep the standard swatch appearance, you can leave Allow for Multiple Selections turned off. With this setup, one swatch will always be pre-selected, but you can add a required field prompt to draw the customer's attention to it before they add to cart.
This is the best option if you want the cleanest visual experience and are comfortable with a value being pre-selected by default.
Option 2: Use Multi selection to require an active choice
If you want customers to make an active selection with nothing pre-selected, enable Allow for Multiple Selections and mark the field as Required.
With this setup:
No swatch is pre-selected when the page loads
Customers must click a swatch before they can add the item to their cart
You can set minimum and maximum selection limits — by default the minimum is 1 with no maximum
The tradeoff is that this changes how swatches behave. Customers click once to select and again to deselect, which is different from standard swatch behavior. For most use cases where you simply want to enforce a selection, this works well.
