Chapter 5
Filling Your Virtual Shelves: Creating Products and Collections
IN THIS CHAPTER
Contrasting collections and products
Creating products and building your collections
Adding variety to your product range
Showcasing your product range
You are making your way towards publishing your first products and collections on your online store, ready for sale. However, you still have some crucial steps ahead before you can activate your store.
In this chapter, I explore developing and curating your collections — adding products to them, describing them in an appealing way, and visually merchandising them so they look great and are easily discoverable on your website.
I also look at using Shopify’s tag feature, which helps your products find their home within a collection — as well as helping your customers to search for them in your store.
Nuts and Bolts: Adding Products to Develop Your Collections
Collections (also known as categories) consist of groups of products that contain similar properties, making it easier for a potential customer to find what they are looking for. Collections can be grouped by a variety of criteria, including season or range, gender, types of products, bestsellers and sale.
After your collection has been published with products inside, it then appears on your website. Upon clicking on a product within a collection, a visitor will be able to look at a product individually in a product page, where they’ll be able to make a purchase if they so choose.
You need to be in the Collections section, located within the Products menu of your Shopify admin, in order to create, develop or maintain a collection.
In Chapter 4, I encourage you to start thinking about the layout of your online store. In the following sections, I guide you through adding products to your online store and creating collections, as well as adding tags and products to your collections.
Creating a collection
In Shopify, you have the option to create one of two types of collection — automated collections and manual collections.
An automated collection uses certain conditions to automatically include certain products into collections. You can add up to 60 selection conditions to your Shopify store. You can also specify whether products need to meet all of the conditions or any of the conditions to be included in the collection. When you add a new product to Shopify that matches your selection conditions for a collection, Shopify automatically adds the product to the collection.
You can save a lot of time by using automated collections if you have a large selection of products or if you have seasonal or rotating inventories. For example, if I create an automated collection and add the selection condition ‘mens-clothes’, every product that I add and tag with ‘mens-clothes’ will automatically go into the ‘Men’s Clothes’ collection (the next section talks more about product tags).
A manual collection includes only the products that you choose to add to a collection. Therefore, the collection always contains the same products unless you specifically add new products or remove old ones.
Manual collections take more work to maintain, but they can be a good choice for small or specialized collections that you intend to curate personally. For example, if you plan to hold a one-time flash sale of just a few products, you can create a manual collection for them and set up a discount for just the products in that collection.
To create a collection:
In the Shopify admin sidebar, navigate to Products → Collections. In the top-right corner, click on Create Collection.
A new page appears (see Figure 5-1), which has a variety of empty text boxes for you to input the information about the collection you want to add to your store.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-1: The Create Collection page.
In the Title box, enter the name of your collection — for example, ‘Men’s Clothes’.
You can leave the description empty for now, as I talk about the SEO (search engine optimization) benefits of writing an effective collection description in Chapter 16.
The title you choose will be visible on your store as it is the name of your collection.Select Manual or Automated collection from the checkbox options below the Description field.
Doing this means that your collection either automatically populates with items as you add certain tags/conditions to new products (for automated collections), or it means that you will manually add products to your collection.
In the Conditions section, select either the All Conditions or Any Condition checkbox.
Here, it’s usual to leave the existing selection, which is All Conditions (though later in this section I explain when it’s helpful to use the Any Condition option).
Type a product tag in the blank field after Product Tag and Is Equal To.
This is the default selection, though you can choose other condition criteria. Here, for example, you can enter the tag ‘mens-jeans’.
As well as Product Tag, you can choose from other conditions for your collections, such as Product Title, Weight, Product Type and Variant’s Title. These are all aspects of the products that you add to your store. These conditions serve as different ways to automatically add products to your collections. So, if you have a collection called ‘Everything Under $50’, you can change the condition to Product Price, select Is Less Than and type ‘$50’ in the blank field that follows. Then, when you add a product to your store with a price that’s less than $50, it’s automatically added to your Everything Under $50 collection.
Experiment with the different conditions you can apply to your collections to work out which options are most useful for your store.Press enter on your keyboard.
Voilà, your product tag will save automatically.
You have the option to add more conditions here (click on Add Another Condition) or you can add further conditions at a later time. I talk more about adding additional product tags in the next section, ‘Using product tags to refine your collections’.
Click on Save in the top-right corner to create your collection.
You can come back later and add more text and images to your collection before you publish your website. Whenever you want to come back and make any edits, just go back to your Shopify admin, click on Products → Collections, select your collection, and then make your edits.
When you are editing your collection, you see a section in the top-right corner called Collection Availability. When you tick the checkbox labelled Online Store, your collection publishes in your store (your collection only shows in your store when you check this checkbox — until then, it is a work in progress). You can also add a collection image when you are ready to publish. Click on Add Image, just below Collection Availability, and upload the image that you want your shoppers to see as they enter your collection.
If you add more than one condition to a collection, then the option that products must match All Conditions or Any Condition becomes important.
Imagine that you’re creating the collection described in the preceding steps and you decide to add a second condition. You click on Add Another Condition, and as you scroll through the condition options (which defaults to Product Tag), you instead select Product Vendor (vendor is another name for supplier; the later section ‘Organization’ talks about adding vendors to your products). If your product’s supplier is called ABC Jeans, you will also enter that information into the Product Vendor section of your product page; to bring all the ABC Jeans products into this collection, you select Is Equal To after Product Vendor, and in the blank field you enter ABC Jeans.
Now, in this collection, you have two conditions:
- A Product Tag that Is Equal To mens-jeans
- A Product Vendor that Is Equal To ABC Jeans.
This is where All Conditions versus Any Condition becomes important. If you selected that products must match all conditions in order to automatically become part of the collection, then a product will only appear in the collection if it meets both of these conditions.
Products that you want to become automatically added to the collection therefore need:
- A product tag called mens-jeans
- For ABC Jeans to be named as the product vendor.
In the same way, if you selected Any Condition rather than All Conditions, then any product you add to your store that matches one of these two conditions will automatically appear in your collection.
Find out how to add these details and many other pieces of helpful product information in the later section ‘Adding a new product to your store’.
Using product tags to refine your collections
Tags are labels you can add to a product to help customers search and find specific products within your online store. Tags are also used to add products to their correct collections (for example, making sure that your blue jeans are displayed in the Jeans collection). I’ll be explaining how to upload products into collections throughout this chapter — first by creating product tags, and then by adding products (see the later section ‘Adding a new product to your store’). Shopify allows you to add up to 250 tags to each product, separated by a comma — although I haven’t seen more than 50 attached to a product.
Keep in mind the following guidelines when setting up tags in your online store:
Use simple characters: Use only ordinary letters, numbers and the hyphen (-) symbol in your tags (although you aren’t required to use a hyphen). Avoid accented characters and other symbols.
Although you can create tags that use some special characters, they may not work as you expect in searches or as conditions in automated collections. Special characters in tags may either be ignored or treated the same as other special characters, making them unhelpful for your store’s search function.
- Keep tag lengths short: For ease of use, keep your tags short. Misspelling a tag may land your product in the wrong collection, or mean it doesn’t show up on your site at all!
- Ensure your tags are simple and understandable: Name your tags in a way that makes sense to you and your staff so that each tag has a clear purpose and is easy to remember.
Check your tags are clear to customers: In some online store themes, your product tags are shown to your customers (such as in drop-down filter menus). Because the tags are visible, you need to make sure that they make sense to customers.
For example, imagine you want to create a tag for the products in a collection for the Autumn 2019 season. You could create the tag myautumn19, but if that tag is shown in a filter menu in your online store, your customers may not understand what it means. A better choice is Autumn-2019.
Jack is selling women’s shoes online. He’s using tags to indicate the heel size of the shoe, such as flat, wedge and high heel. He’s also using tags to indicate the shoe color, such as black, navy and red (when a product has more than one color or size option, that’s referred to in Shopify as a product variant, which I’ll be running through in the later section, ‘Step seven: Adding variants’). The theme Jack uses in Shopify has a filter in the collection page, which allows customers to filter products by tag, so if a customer filters products by ‘flat’ shoes, all of Jack’s flat shoe products that are in that collection appear. If the customer then adds a filter that says ‘red’, all of Jack’s flat red shoes that are in that collection appear.
If you like the idea of including a filter option to your online store, make sure your theme has one by checking the theme’s demo website in the theme store (themes.shopify.com/themes) or by using a third-party app from the Shopify app store — for example:
- Collection Filter by Supple
- Smart Product Filter & Search by Globo
- Product Filter & Search by Boost Commerce
- Collection Filter & Search Bar by SoBooster
To use tags to automate the grouping of products within collections (known in Shopify as setting up an automated collection — refer to the preceding section ‘Creating a collection’ for more on this), you first need to create the tag name when you create the collection — for example, you need to create the tag mens-jeans when you create a collection called Men’s Jeans. You can then use that collection when you set up each product that goes into the Men’s Jeans collection.
You marry your products to your collections automatically with every product you add to your store if you have your collection tags set up, ready to accumulate new products. When you add products to your store and include a correlating product tag, they automatically join any collection containing the same collection tag. For example, if you have a collection called Men’s Jeans (with the collection tag mens-jeans) and you add a new pair of jeans as a new product (with the product tag mens-jeans), the jeans will be added to the Men’s Jeans collection.
Only automated collections can use tags to automate the grouping of products to a collection. A manual collection requires you to add products to a collection one by one.
To add a tag to a collection (to illustrate here, I continue with the Men’s Jeans example):
In the Shopify admin sidebar, navigate to Products → Collections.
A list of the collections you have created appears.
Click into the collection you want to prepare to add products to, and scroll down to Conditions (see Figure 5-2).
For example, click into the Men’s Jeans collection.
The Conditions section only appears if you selected automated collections when you created the collection.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-2: Adding collection tags to an automatic collection in Shopify.
In the drop-down menu under Conditions (in the Conditions section of the Men’s Jeans collection page), select Product Tag, Is Equal To and type in your product tag (for example, mens-jeans).
Product Tag should already be selected as a default in the Conditions section, and using product tags is the most common way to use automatic collections. By selecting Is Equal To, you are confirming that only products that match the product tag can be added to the collection. Finally, by entering the product tag mens-jeans, you are indicating that any products tagged with mens-jeans will be added to the collection.
- Click on Save in the top-right corner.
Now that the product tag mens-jeans has been added to this collection, any time you create a product and enter the tag mens-jeans in the Tags section of the Add Product page, that product will automatically be added to your Men’s Jeans collection, meaning all products tagged with mens-jeans will appear in the collection. See the later section ‘Tags’ for more on adding product tags to your products.
If you prefer not to use collection tags and would rather add products one at a time to their respective collections, ensure that you select Manual Collection when you set up your collections (refer to the earlier section ‘Creating a collection’). Look out for the steps in the later ‘Collections’ section for more on populating products into collections manually.
Adding collections to your menu
In Chapter 4, I showed you how to create menus and add pages to your menu (such as your About Us and Shipping pages). Here, I’m going to show you how to add your newly created collections to your header menu.
Your header menu is where shoppers go to browse your collections. Think of your menu as a gateway to your collections — every collection you create should have a place in your store’s menu.
Imagine you have a collection called Men’s Jeans. To add this collection to your menu, follow these steps:
Navigate to your main Shopify admin menu. Click on Sales Channels → Online Store. Select Navigation from the list of headings that appears.
The Navigation page appears, with two menus listed: Footer Menu and Main Menu.
Click on Main Menu.
The Main Menu page appears.
On the Main Menu page, under Menu Items, click on Add Menu Item.
A dialogue box appears on the right-hand side of the page, which prompts you to fill out two fields: Name and Link (see Figure 5-3).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-3: Adding collections to your header menu in Shopify.
- In the Name field, type your collection name; for example, Men’s Jeans.
In the Link field (which prompts you to search for or paste a link), start typing your collection name (in this case, Men’s Jeans). Because your collection already exists in Shopify, as you start to type it will recognize your Men’s Jeans collection and it will appear on a drop-down list of options. Click on Men’s Jeans.
Men’s Jeans appears in the Link field (see Figure 5-3).
Click the green Add button in the bottom-right corner of the dialogue box.
You’ll be taken back to the Main Menu section, where you can now see your new menu item, the Men’s Jeans collection, listed under your menu items.
Click on the green Save Menu button in the bottom-right corner.
Visitors to your store will now be able to see your Men’s Jeans collection in your main menu, and when they click on it they will be taken to your Men’s Jeans collection, where they can browse all the men’s jeans in your store!
Adding a new product to your store
By now you’ve probably spent countless time (and possibly a fair bit of money in the process) sourcing what you hope to be your breakthrough ecommerce products, so now it’s time to add these products to your store, bringing you one step closer to opening your doors and going live.
Adding products in Shopify means creating product listings for the products you have sourced and intend to sell through your online store. You create product listings in the Shopify admin panel (the back end of your site), and they are displayed to your store’s visitors on your website (the front end).
Adding a product to your store is a major deal. You can’t just throw your products online in the hope they’ll sell themselves; like all the pages of your online store, each product page needs to be compiled strategically — with appropriate and engaging images and product descriptions — to lure the customer further down the path towards purchasing.
The main components of a product listing are the images of the product and the product description. In the following sections, I talk you step by step through how to create a product, including setting an initial price and inventory level, so that you are ready to start selling online.
Because this is a process following many steps, I break the steps into subsections, with their own headings — but each section follows part of an overall process. Read through the following sections before you get started so you can gather all the information you need before you begin — including your product description and the product images you want to add to your image gallery.
If you only partially create a product — for example, you enter a title but nothing else — as long as you hit Save, then your product will be ready for you to return to editing when you can. Find any products you want to edit in the All Products section of the Products section of your Shopify admin.
If you forget to save your progress, you’ll be prompted to either save or discard your work. Hit your favorite green Save button in the top-right corner to save your new product.
When you’ve worked through all the steps and saved your product, remember to check out your product through the eyes of your customers by clicking on Preview in the top-right corner of the Add Product page!
Step one: Getting started with adding a new product
To create a new product in Shopify:
From your Shopify admin, click on Products → All Products.
This takes you to a new page that displays all of your store’s products, with a green button in the top-right corner labelled Add Product.
Click on Add Product.
The Add Product page appears (see Figure 5-4). This is the money page — the all-important page where you will add each of your new products.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-4: The Add Product page.
Add a product name in the Title field of the Add Product page.
Check out what some of your competitors are doing with their product names, and when you have one, go ahead and place your product name in the title field.
For example, if you are adding a pair of men’s jeans to your store, you want to choose a name that makes it clear you are selling a pair of jeans — so include ‘Jeans’ in the product name.
Naming your products is much like naming your children — throw a few names in a hat, swirl them around and pluck out the lucky winner! Okay, so I may have simplified that, but the chances are your supplier or manufacturer has a very boring serial number, or product code, so your job is to rename that product into something that resonates with your customers and suits your brand.
You can change your product name (and any other product details) at any time, but changes may impact your reporting — for example, changing ‘Charlie Jeans in Blue’ to ‘Charlie Blue Jeans’ means the same item appears as two different products in your reporting. I’d suggest trying your best to set it up cleanly from the start — your future self will thank you.
Step two: Adding a product description to your product
It’s a challenge to constantly write and produce content that pays homage to one product, particularly if you have a large range of SKUs (stock-keeping units). You want the meaty stuff to appear in the product description, as it should appear above the fold of the product page (the content that sits in plain sight before a shopper needs to scroll down; therefore, it’s the MVP real estate on any web page) — in other words, this will stand out and be seen by potential customers, so think key features, measurements and technical specs.
Different themes display part or all of the product description above the fold, and some prefer to have it lower down, with the Add to Cart button or other information sitting higher above the fold. Browse your theme’s product pages to find one that suits. I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule to follow — though I recommend you always AB test different layouts (I explain AB testing in Chapter 9) — but as a general rule I suggest trying to keep the meaty stuff on your product page above the fold.
Here’s a few ideas for what to include in your product description:
- Weight and dimensions of the product
- A description of the material used
- Any technical specifications that come with your product
- A clear summary of your product’s unique selling points (USPs)
Keep your product descriptions practical — why is your customer shopping for a product like yours? One likely reason is as a solution to a problem — a dress to wear at a party, a pair of boots to wear hiking or a trampoline for the kids. Tell the customer why your product is the one for them — for example, the dress can be worn two ways; the boots are waterproof; the trampoline is rated AAA for safety.
Within a product description, more is more — if it’s useful. If the product description content isn’t adding value to the decision-making process, you may need to rework it. There’s no real guide to how much you need to say in a product description, so stop when you think you’ve covered everything.
To add a product description to your product:
Return to the Add Product page from the preceding section ‘Step one: Getting started with adding a new product’.
Directly below the Title field you’ll see the Description box (what Shopify calls the rich text editor).
Enter your product description in the Description box.
Your product description is the information your customers read when they’re weighing up whether to buy your product. This is where you can solve your customers’ problems using the written word!
Your job is to inform and persuade, not to write the next great play. You want to talk about everything glorious about your product, and above all, explain how your product solves the customer’s problem. If you can’t answer that question yourself, there’s a fair chance you need to rethink your product selection.
Step three: Adding media to your products
The product description (refer to the preceding section) may help to sell your customers on the technical aspects of your products, but visual media is the eye-catching way you attract customers to your products at a glance — and you can add visual media in the Media section of the Add Product page (the Media section appears after the Description section on the page).
Media is another name for photos, images, GIFs (graphics interchange format), videos, augmented reality (think of an online rug store that allows you to upload a photo of your living room to its site, then shows you how your rug looks in your living room) or any other form of graphic that you can use to display your products.
When it comes to product page images, I think both quality and quantity are important, alongside a good product description. If you’re selling dog food online, you may not need as many images, but the product description and ingredients are likely to be more important to customers; however, if you’re selling clothes, you’re best advised to provide a lot of photos, along with a clear product description.
If your online store sells something visual — something that people display, either on themselves or in their households — it’s a good idea to show off that product in various scenarios, including real life, so aim to include product photos and lifestyle photos. For example, if you’re selling a rug, you can show images of the front and back of the rug, as well as picture the rug positioned in a living room (or in various living rooms), so that the potential customer can envisage that rug in their own home (you can also offer an augmented reality option to see how it may look against a photo of their own living room).
If you want your customers to be able to view your products in augmented reality (AR), you need 3D models of your products. Try the Shopify Experts marketplace (experts.shopify.com) to find an expert to help with creating 3D models. You need to use a theme that supports 3D or augmented reality — the default Shopify Debut theme does not do this ‘out of the box’.
The same applies for clothing — while some stores show an outfit against a white background, most successful online clothing stores show the clothes on a model, in various poses.
Show clothing items on a diverse range of models, as obviously not all people look the same. People want to get an idea of how a product will look on them in real life.
Product photos aren’t all about showing off how a product looks; they can also be used to demonstrate functionality. If you’re selling a bag that looks great but the unique selling point (USP) is its ability to hold a large variety of items, then you need to show that functionality through your images. For more functional items, instead of the showy model poses you may instead opt for detailed photos of the inside of the bag, or images that show how a laptop and diary fit in the bag.
Of course, an evening bag is a different proposition — and modelling the bag with different outfits may help to sell the bag more than a photo of the inside of the bag. But functionality may still be a feature to consider — does it fit a phone, purse and keys, for example? Do you need to show this too?
Sellers need to understand their value proposition for each product: Are you going for fashion, function or (sometimes) both? If it’s function, make sure you talk to that function through your product description and your range of product images.
When it comes to the number of product images to show, I tend to suggest more rather than less. It isn’t uncommon for fashion brands to use more than 10 images on the product page, including a mixture of product and lifestyle shots.
You can also include video and movement in the product images section, and I’m seeing this a lot more these days. It doesn’t need to be a long video, and it may only be a GIF that has an element of movement, without requiring full video production resources. For example, if you sell a product that is made from recycled plastic, you may have a GIF or some form of motion graphics that illustrates the plastic being turned into your product. The plus side of motion like this is that it’s often well-received across social media.
You can hire talented motion graphics specialists on platforms like Upwork to create content for you, often relatively cheaply.
The downside of video can be the impact it has on your website’s speed, although Shopify is great at handling this so you can expect to be able to load video on a decent theme. If in doubt, test how well — and quickly — the added video works on your site across a range of devices.
A product zoom feature (which allows the user to zoom in on the details of your products) is always helpful, and most Shopify themes provide this option. Zooming in is particularly useful if you’re selling products with a lot of detail. If you add a zoom feature to your items, remember to test how it works on both a desktop and a smartphone.
To add product media, follow these steps:
Return to the Add Product page from the earlier section ‘Step one: Getting started with adding a new product’.
If you’ve saved a product you were adding to your store, but hadn’t quite finished, you can always go back to it and keep going with any of these steps — just click on Products → All Products from your Shopify admin. All your products, including draft products, will be listed here — just click on the one you want to keep editing.Directly below the Title field and the Description box, you see the Media section.
Click on the Add Files button located in the Media section.
A box showing your computer’s file contents appears.
Select a media file from your computer, and click on Open.
The image or media file that you clicked on appears in the Media section of the product creation page.
Repeat the process until you have as many photos or media items as you want to include for your selected product — for example, I may decide to include five images of my Charlie Jeans in Blue.
Drag the images into the order that you want them to be displayed on your website.
The first image (the image in the first position) will be the image shown in any collections in which the product appears (for example, Men’s Jeans); therefore, this image will be the first image a shopper will see. Make it a good one!
If you also want to add a video, follow the same steps but select the video you want to upload, rather than images.
You can have up to 250 media items across all products on Basic Shopify, 1,000 on Shopify, and 5,000 on Advanced Shopify.
Step four: Pricing your product
The next cab off the rank is pricing (the Pricing section appears after the Media section on the Add Product page).
The Pricing section has three fields in which you can enter information: Price, Compare at Price and Cost Per Item (see Figure 5-5).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-5: The Pricing section on the Add Product page.
To update your Pricing section, complete the three Pricing fields as follows:
Price: Enter your original recommended retail price (RRP) into the Price field.
Imagine you are selling my Charlie Jeans in Blue at $99. Enter 99 or 99.00 (the decimal only matters if I’m selling them at a price that is not rounded to the nearest whole number, such as 99.95).
Compare at Price: Use this field to provide a price comparison when you want to discount your product.
Imagine you now want to discount the Charlie Jeans in Blue. To do this, you move the original price ($99) into the Compare at Price field, and put the new price (say, $50) into the Price field. This allows your customers to see the original price with a line through it, and the new bargain sale price.
Cost Per Item: Here, you enter your landed cost price (the cost of your products, including the cost of shipping them to you).
Adding your landed cost price to your products helps you generate accurate profit margin reports.Tick the box that says Charge Tax on This Product if you’re registered to collect and pay tax. Chapter 6 shares more information on tax.
If you ever need to adjust your pricing, or put a product on sale, you can find your product under Products → All Products in your Shopify admin. Simply search for your product and make the edits you require.
Step five: Adding your initial inventory quantity
The Inventory section appears below the Pricing section. It includes three sections: SKU, Barcode and Quantity (see Figure 5-6).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-6: The Inventory section on the Add Product page.
I dedicate Chapter 11 to managing inventory, so all you need to do for now is set up your initial inventory quantity, also known as your stock on hand (SOH).
To enter your opening inventory, simply enter the quantity of the product that you’re making available to sell in the Quantity field of the Inventory section on your Add Product page. For example, if I have 100 pairs of the Charlie Jeans in Blue to sell, I enter 100 in the Available box located under Quantity.
The other two fields within the Inventory section ask you to enter a SKU and a barcode (although it’s not mandatory). If you have a SKU (stock-keeping unit) code or barcode, enter them here. A SKU is a code you or your supplier creates, which usually goes onto a barcode or product label; a barcode is a little sticker that sits on your product label, containing information such as size, color and price. Both are ways of identifying each product and are particularly useful for barcode scanners and inventory management systems (IMSs). Although you’re not likely to be using scanners at this point, I recommend entering your SKU as it’s going to be used to generate reports, and if you decide to sell on marketplaces like eBay or Amazon, or use a warehouse management system (WMS) or external warehouse to store your goods, or even list your products in Google Shopping or Facebook, the SKU is a universal way of deciphering one product from another.
I explain more about SKUs and barcodes in relation to logistics in Chapter 11.
Do you want to pre-sell stock before it lands in your warehouse? If so, check the Continue Selling When Out of Stock box in the Inventory section of your Add Product page (the checkbox is just below the SKU field). For each additional order after you reach zero stock, your inventory drops below 0 and into negative quantities. If you adopt this strategy, make sure you communicate delivery times with your customer, and keep them updated.
Another option in the Inventory section of your Add Product page is to tick Track Quantity (also under the SKU field) if you want to keep track (through your reporting) of how many units you’ve sold. Leave it unticked if you have an unlimited supply of products (which may be useful when you’re not actually holding the inventory, such as when you’re using a dropshipping model).
Step six: Selecting shipping options
The next section of the Add Product page is Shipping (see Figure 5-7).
The first item you see in the Shipping section is a checkbox (This Is a Physical Product). You check this for any product that needs shipping — so any physical product. You may think that this always applies, but if you are selling digital products, such as a digital course, you don’t check this checkbox as there’s nothing to physically ship.
The next part of the Shipping section asks you to add your product’s Weight. Adding the weight tells your carrier how much your parcels weigh, or it can help Shopify calculate your shipping rates if you have weight-based shipping rules. Enter your product’s weight in the Weight field.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-7: The Shipping section of the Add Product page (located under the Inventory section).
If you’re charging a flat shipping rate, you can leave the weight at 0.00; otherwise, you need to weigh each product and enter the weight here.
You don’t need to add a weight, but if you do, resist the urge to under-declare the weight of your products, as shipping companies often hit you with increased rates based on the true, adjusted weight. Always be extra careful when providing weights (especially volumetric weights) to shipping companies.
The final part of the Shipping section covers Customs Information and only applies to international shipping. If you’re planning to ship internationally, you can enter your country of origin (in other words, where your product was manufactured) in the Country/Region of Origin field. You can also enter your HS (Harmonized System) code, if you know it.
If in doubt over any element of product shipping, turn to chapters 6, 12 and 13, where I cover your shipping options in more detail.
Step seven: Adding variants
The next section of the Add Product page covers Variants (you find this section under the Shipping section). Figure 5-8 shows the Variants section of the Add Product page.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-8: The Variants section of the Add Product page.
Variants are extensions of products or extra options within products, such as colors or sizes. For example, my Charlie Jeans in Blue may come in three sizes (small, medium and large), where each size is a variant.
Each product can be described in up to three different ways, such as by size, color and style.
To add a variant to your product:
Return to the Add Product page.
If you are editing your product at a later time, click on Products → All Products from your Shopify admin. All your products, including draft products, will be listed here — just click on the one you want to keep editing.
Scroll down to the Variants section of the Add Product page.
This is the section after the Shipping section in the Add Product page.
Check the box marked This Product Has Multiple Options, Like Different Sizes or Colors.
The Options area appears.
By default, the Options area shows you Option 1, which Shopify has named Size (because size is the most commonly added variant for online sellers, although you can edit it to Color, Material or anything you want). There’s a space then left next to Size, with grey text that says Separate Options with a Comma.
Enter your sizes, for example Small,Medium,Large (each size/variant is typed with no spaces, just separated by a comma).
Once you’ve entered in your Size options, you can move on or create a new option (by clicking on Add Another Option), such as color.
Option values may be sizes, styles or colors. Customers see these option values when they are choosing a variant.
In Figure 5-9, you see two options that have variants: Size and Color. I have entered three size variants (they appear here as S, M and L). I have also added another option called Color with two variants (they appear here as Blue and Black). From here, a box appears, asking you for the price, quantity and SKU of each variant. The price will be pre-populated, as most colors or sizes are the same price (most customers would be baffled if my M Blue Jeans cost more than my L Blue Jeans), but your quantity in stock of each color and size may be different, so you can enter those quantities here. Each variant requires its own SKU too — this is important in areas like warehousing, where a picker won’t necessarily look at the item they are picking to send to your customer; instead, they scan the barcode or look at the SKU. (Some warehouses have thousands of products, so it’s impossible for one person to visually recognize what each product looks like, which is why warehouses use barcodes and SKUs — and scanners to recognize them!)
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-9: The Variants section of the Add Product page with initial variant details added.
Each product can have up to 100 variants, although I’ve never seen any store come close to that number of variants of one product! (If you need more variants, you can find third-party applications to help with this — but I’ve never seen a store require this.)
Sometimes a variant is known as a child or simple product, with the style itself called the parent or configurable product.
Step eight: Making some final adjustments
The final section of the Add Product page is the SEO Preview section, which is not something you need to set up now. I give more context on how you can use this section to optimize your products and how they appear in search engine results in Chapter 15 on marketing.
However, just because you’ve reached the end of the Add Product page, it doesn’t mean you can’t make some final changes before your product is ready to launch. In the following sections I talk through some additional options you can access on the right-hand side of the Add Product page to make some extra adjustments to your added products (see Figure 5-10).
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 5-10: Additional options on the Add Product page.
PRODUCT STATUS
The first section is Product Status, which is set to Draft mode until you are ready to launch your product. Change this to Active mode when you’re ready for the world to see your product — it will go live on your front end (the customer-facing part of your website), ready to be purchased by your customers.
SALES CHANNELS AND APPS
Next in the right-hand menu at the top of the Add Product page is the Sales Channels and Apps section. This shows you a list of all your sales channels, for example Online Store, which is, you guessed it, your online store sales channel. Check the boxes for all sales channels you want to sell your product on — for now, you should only see Online Store, so make sure you check that box.
This section also shows any other sales channels you add to your store, such as eBay or Amazon. Turn to Chapter 3 to look at some options for other marketplace sales channels.
ORGANIZATION
Next up is Organization, and in this section you can update your Product Type and Vendor.
Your product type is often a repeat of your collection name, like jeans, or shoes, and is used in product reporting, which I cover fully in Chapter 14. So, for my Charlie Jeans in Blue, I enter Jeans in the Product Type field.
Your vendor is your supplier — the company you bought your products from. So, for my Charlie Jeans in Blue, I enter the name of the company that I bought the Blue Jeans from in the Vendor field. You can use vendor information to generate reports (see Chapter 14) or create purchase orders through third-party apps like Stocky.
COLLECTIONS
The next section on the right-hand side of the Add Product page is Collections, which has an empty box prompting you to Search for Collections. You can use this search function to manually add products to collections.
Imagine you are selling jeans and you have set up your Jeans collection to be a manual collection. To add your new product — for example, I may add my Charlie Jeans in Blue here — to a collection of jeans, you can search for Jeans in the Collections search field. What you will see by default when you click on the Search for Collections box is a list of all the manual collections you have set up in your store. You can scroll through the list, ticking the checkbox next to the collection name that you want the Charlie Jeans in Blue to appear in, or you can start typing the name of the collection (Jeans) in the search box, and the Jeans collection should appear as you type. Select the Jeans collection by ticking the checkbox, which ensures that the Charlie Jeans in Blue are added to the Jeans collection.
You can have products in more than one collection — for example, you may want to create a New Arrivals collection that you’d also like to add the Charlie Jeans in Blue to.
TAGS
Tags are used in Shopify to help customers find your products when they use the search function on your site, and they’re also used to slot products into their respective collections! In the earlier section ‘Using product tags to refine your collections’, I talk you through what tags are and how they can help you refine your collections; here, I show you how to close the loop on connecting your product tags to your collection tags using automatic collections.
To illustrate, I return to my example of the Charlie Jeans in Blue.
Imagine I want to add the Charlie Jeans in Blue to a collection of Men’s Clothes. First, I need to ensure that I have already set up the collection Men’s Clothes. When I know my Men’s Clothes collection is in place and set up as an automatic collection, I can add a product tag in the Tags field here to ensure that the Charlie Jeans in Blue go into this collection.
To do this, I enter mens-clothes into the product tags field and press the Enter key on my keyboard. The product tag mens-clothes appears in the Tags field. The Charlie Jeans in Blue now live in the Men’s Clothes Collection, thanks to the tag I have added here in the product page, which marries up to the tag in the Men’s Clothes collection page.
You can add more than one product tag to each product, such as mens-jeans or blue-jeans, as a product can and usually does sit in more than one collection in your store.
Remember to click on the Save button to ensure that these product tags are saved to your product.
To remove a product tag, simply click on the ‘x’ symbol next to the tag you want to remove.
ONLINE STORE
The final section of the right-hand sidebar of the Add Product page is called Online Store. You’re not likely to ever use this. It has a subheading titled Default Product. Default Product is the standard product page theme that is available within the theme you select for your website, and you won’t be required to deviate from this.
If you hire a web developer to add a selection of product pages on top of what your theme comes with, they appear here. For example, you may want a product page that looks one way for jeans, and completely different for hats (which is not common in the early days of an ecommerce career). If you do get to the stage where you want to hire a developer to extend your website’s capabilities, they will know what to do — so you don’t have to!
Merchandising Your Collections
The products that you show first in your collections are likely to get the most eyeballs on them. Online shoppers can be an impatient bunch and may bounce off your site at the slightest friction — for example, if they see too many products they don’t want to buy.
By default, Shopify displays the products in each collection in alphabetical order. However, you can change that to sort your products in different ways:
- Alphabetical (or reverse alphabetical) order
- Bestselling products first
- Highest (or lowest) price products first
- Manually (so you order them however you choose)
- Newest (or oldest) products first (based on the date created)
In my experience, if you have a reasonable range of SKUs (say, 50 or more) and you’re dropping new products every three months or less, a New Arrivals collection tends to get a good share of traffic. In the case of New Arrivals, you can set the default sorting to newest to oldest, but in all other cases, I suggest having your bestselling products within the first few rows of a collection, and then manually scattering in other products (perhaps new items or even other collections that have been well received).
Group like products together, so if you have a bag in both black and tan variants, it’s visually pleasing to see these displayed alongside each other in a collection. Turn to the earlier section ‘Step seven: Adding variants’ to find out more about adding variants in color, size and style to your products.
I’ve worked with businesses that are obsessed with listing old products first because they need to go — but if they’ve been hanging around for good reason (that is, no one wants them!), they may never sell well. If you have a physical retail store and someone walks by and glances at your shop window, you want them to see your best products so that they stop and come in for a closer look. Ecommerce is no different — you want your best products front and center as they will get the highest click-through rate (the percentage of clicks versus views).
Third-party apps are available to help you visually merchandise (VM) your store, but I recommend always putting your best foot forward and giving prime real estate to your bestselling products, especially at the start of your ecommerce journey.
When you’re further along your ecommerce path, you may look to introduce some artificial intelligence (AI) into the mix. AI is a form of machine-learnt intelligence that provides insights or takes actions based on certain behaviors. Some great AI solutions are available that you can integrate with Shopify, including Klevu and Nosto — search for these in the Shopify App Store. I talk about these sorts of AI solutions in Chapter 10 when I look at personalization, as they cover a whole range of personalization techniques as well as merchandising your products within collections.
Activating Products in Your Store
After you’ve finished creating your first product, you’ve previewed it in both desktop and mobile, and you’re happy with it, you can go ahead and save it, or change it from Draft to Active in the top-right corner of the Add Product page.
Select Active when you’re happy with your product. As soon as your store is published (or goes live), your customers will be able to discover your active products.
If your store is already up and running, any new products go live as soon as they are made active.