Shopify Tags and Categories: An Introduction to Organizing your Product Listings
As an eCommerce business owner, one of your top priorities is ensuring that your Shopify storefront provides a great customer experience. After all, customers will be deterred from buying your product if your site is confusing or difficult to use. This is certainly something to watch if you have a wide range of products. Customers often have a certain thing in mind when they’re shopping, and it can be frustrating having to pick through hundreds of products to find what they’re looking for.
That’s where Shopify’s collections, tags, and categories come in. These functions allow you to organize your products effectively, creating a seamless buyer journey. In this article, we’ll be running through what collections, categories and tags are, their role and importance for your online storefront, and best practices for implementing and using them.
WHAT ARE SHOPIFY PRODUCT TAGS AND CATEGORIES?
Tags serve to describe your products, and narrow down a customer’s search, whereas categories are the product taxonomy, otherwise known as how it is displayed on the navigation menu. Further to this, collections are how you group your products based on similar attributes. In short, collections and categories group your products broadly, whereas tags are much more specific.
When creating your collections, or categories, you’ll need to choose a title and a description. The description is optional, but can be beneficial for SEO, as it’s another way to insert keywords and improve your search ranking. The title, however, is mandatory and requires some thought.
Think about what your customers are searching for, and which keywords they might be prone to using when looking for that product. For instance, if you have an online bookstore, you might use category titles such as “audiobooks”, or “ebooks”. Then, you might tag your products with things like “autobiography”, and “supernatural thriller”. So, a customer looking for a book about the First World War, and a customer looking for Obama’s autobiography won’t need to scan through all books marked e-book, or even all books in a “nonfiction” collection. This is an easy way for your customers to weed out what they don’t want, and quickly find what they do.
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If you’re growing your business, and don’t have time to individually title or tag all your products, you can also set a condition on Shopify, which is a set of rules that groups any new products into the relevant collection or category. For instance, you can hide any products that go out of stock by setting a condition to hide any products with an inventory stock level of 0.
Categories VS Collections
In the section above, we touched on both categories and collections. While they both serve the same purpose – grouping your products – there are slight differences that influence how and when you use them. Not sure how to manage your product inventory? Check out our guide to Product Information Management as well as our top PIM recommendations for ecommerce businesses.
Collections are related by a similar characteristic, allowing store owners to better manage inventory. These then appear on a collections page. Using the above bookstore example, you might create collections for “best books this year” and “as seen on booktok”, or “beach reads.”
Categories, on the other hand, serve to filter your products based on how you want them to appear on the main navigation bar, according to Shopify’s product taxonomy. So, in addition to the categories, you might create custom collections for your customers to navigate, such as “new this year,” and “top rated.” These can also appear in your navigation, by nesting the collection page link. This way, customers can easily see what you offer, and select the appropriate category to browse through. It all comes down to how you wish to streamline your inventory, and what feels right for your store.
A best practice to keep in mind when creating your categories is to ensure that they aren’t too niche. It’s great to have collections for exactly what you’re selling, but the more specific the collection name, the less searchable it becomes. Think of these as keywords, from the perspective of your customer. Collections such as “best books 2023” are widely searched, while still being specific enough to filter out some of your inventory, whereas a collection such as “presidential autobiographies” might be too detailed – unless of course, you specialize in autobiographies from political figures. Again, it’s all about knowing your own business, and your audience.
You can also create custom collections for specific things. For instance, during the wedding season, a clothing store might have a collection of “wedding guest dresses”.
Tags VS Categories
Now that we’ve established what a category is, and how it differs from collections, we can start looking at the role that tags have to play when organizing your products.
Tags are used to label your products with more detail, so that they can be narrowed down even further, within the same category or collection. An example of this could look something like this:
Collection: Best books of 2023
Sub-collection: History
Tags: 21st century history, first world war memoir
Pro Tip: If you’re struggling to come up with tags that suit your products, revisit your keyword list, and pull from there
Why Using These Functions is Important
It can be easy to simply choose a few collections or categories, and add your products to those, especially if you run a store without much product diversity. While this might be an effective way to organize your storefront at the beginning, it’s not efficient when you’re looking to scale, add new products, or even adjust your audience and messaging.
By having your products in collections or categories, and using tags for specific criteria, you’re helping your customers find the products they might not have found, otherwise. Try to envision your store if it were physical – if a customer wants a new pair of blue jeans, they will have a much easier time of it in a store like Zara, rather than at a yard sale.
ADDING COLLECTIONS AND CATEGORIES
Now that we understand how collections and categories work, and when to use them, we can start learning how to create them.
Automated VS Manual
When it comes to creating new collections, you have an option of doing it automatically, or manually.
Automatic collections add any related products to your collection through conditions. As we discussed earlier, conditions are criteria, or a set of rules, that Shopify pulls from when assigning products to a collection. This is a great way to manage your collections if you have a large inventory, as you only need to set up your conditions once, and then Shopify will do the rest when new products are added.
Manual collections, on the other hand, require you to assign the products to a collection yourself. This gives you more control, but can be tedious & takes extra time. You can fully customize what goes into your collection or category, but need to update it regularly, and by hand, individually adding products. This can be useful if you only have a small number of products, or are not looking to scale any time soon, such as seasonal offers.
Sub-Collections
Creating sub-collections is a great way to narrow down your inventory even further, and help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for. This works similarly to our collections and categories, wherein you first create the sub-collection and then add your products to it. Again, this can be done either manually or automatically, with preset conditions.
You can also display your sub-collections in your main menu, if relevant.
How to Add Products
Now that you know how to create your collections, it’s time to add some of your products. As mentioned, you can do this either manually or automatically.
- First create or open a product
- Click “product organization”
- If you’re doing it manually, select “collection” and choose which one. If you’re doing it automatically, you can skip this step
- Save
TAGS
Once you have your collections, subcollections, and categories all in place, it’s time to start tagging your products. Tags are essentially just labels that you can assign to your products to help organize your Shopify store. Including tags in your store structure can help improve the customer experience, as they can easily search for the exact products they need. This is especially important as you scale your business to grow. The wider and more diverse your product inventory, the harder it is to maintain it. Tags are a quick and easy way to organize yourself, while also helping the customer.
Pro Tip: not all Shopify themes display tags on the product page. If you are looking to include tags as a large part of your UX and SEO strategy, check whether your theme has the functionality for it. If you already have an established theme or website, don’t worry! You can also edit the code to allow for this.
Creating a tag strategy
Think of your tags like keywords. It’s fine to add obvious and relevant tags where you can, but having a strategy in place when tagging your products will be more impactful on your position in the search rankings. The biggest thing to keep in mind is your audience, and understanding what they want. If you can research and pinpoint your customer’s pain points – in the instance of our online bookstore, perhaps they are going on vacation and want a quick and fun book to read on the beach – you can then choose your keyword and tags appropriately.
How to add and remove tags
Once you’ve established your tag strategy, and chosen which tags to use, it’s time to add tags to your products. Follow the below steps in the backend of your Shopify store to add a tag:
- Open the product page
- Under “tags”, enter the keyword, or tag, you wish to assign to the product. You can also select this from a list of existing tags
- Save
To remove a tag, the steps are:
- Open the product page
- Click “x”, on the tag you want to remove
- Save
It’s as simple as that! You can also add or remove the tag from the “manage” section of that product page.
Pro Tip: do regular audits of your products, and ensure to remove any tags that are no longer relevant
Bulk actions
Another great thing about tagging your products is that you can perform bulk actions. Rather than go through and individually add tags to every product, you can bulk add tags, as well as bulk remove them, all in one go. This frees up time for you to focus on things that really matter to your business.
Tagging best practices
To ensure that your tags are working as effectively for your store as possible, there are some best practices to keep in mind when tagging your products. Shopify recommends sticking to the below guidelines:
- Characters: avoid special characters, and stick to using normal letters and numbers
- Length – try to keep your tags as short as possible. If you’re finding that you can’t fit it all into one tag, try splitting it into two. For example, the tag “blue ceramic dishwasher-safe mug” is not optimized. Try instead “blue” “dishwasher-safe” and “mug”
- Keep your tags simple to understand and easy to read
- Be clear in your tagging. Remember that certain themes show your tags in the drop-down menu, so try to avoid keyword stuffing
MAINTENANCE
Managing tags and collections
While getting all of your products into the relevant collections, adding to your navigation, and tagging them all appropriately is a massive feat, the work doesn’t stop there. It’s now up to you to maintain your tags and collections as new products come in, old products go out of stock, trends go in and out of season, and as your store grows and changes over time.
Then automate this process by bulk adding tags to your products as they come in. This is when having a good tagging strategy comes into play, as you won’t need to analyze each individual product and come up with a tag to add to it. You’ll have your predetermined tags just in reach, or already in an existing list. For example, if you add all your white t-shirts to your store at once, you can bulk add the tag “white t-shirt,” in one go.
Then, you can set up your automatic collections to add products according to specific tag criteria. Of course, it’s also best practice to spot-check and manually upload any outliers, as they come along.
Pro Tip: do regular audits of your tags and website as trends change, so that you can move around products or amend tags, to remain up to date in your industry
Third-party tools and integrations
It can be difficult to juggle all these organization tactics, while also running a business. It’s simple to add a tag here and there, or create a collection every now and again, but if you have a rapidly growing inventory, keeping on top of adding them to the website – let alone organizing or even optimizing them – can become impossible. Luckily, there are many tools available that automate this process and can free up the time that you need to focus on growing and expanding your eCommerce store.
Shopify offers third-party apps that can help with the organization process, to streamline your inventory management. Consider installing apps that can automate tagging or sorting. We recommend researching all the tools available and choosing the right one for you, that solves your specific pain points.
If you’d like to know more about how to automate optimizations for your Shopify store, check out our article on the best 15 Shopify listing optimization tools.
So, there you have it! How you can organize your product listings with Shopify tags and categories. There are endless pieces of information and resources about keeping your Shopify store in tip top shape. But, if you post & sell on other platforms, stay in the know by checking out all of our guides to optimizing your online business. We also have articles that deep-dive into optimizing another major part of your Shopify product page: your images. Have additional questions? You can always reach out to our team at hey@soona.co
Shopify Tags and Categories: An Introduction to Organizing your Product Listings
As an eCommerce business owner, one of your top priorities is ensuring that your Shopify storefront provides a great customer experience. After all, customers will be deterred from buying your product if your site is confusing or difficult to use. This is certainly something to watch if you have a wide range of products. Customers often have a certain thing in mind when they’re shopping, and it can be frustrating having to pick through hundreds of products to find what they’re looking for.
That’s where Shopify’s collections, tags, and categories come in. These functions allow you to organize your products effectively, creating a seamless buyer journey. In this article, we’ll be running through what collections, categories and tags are, their role and importance for your online storefront, and best practices for implementing and using them.
WHAT ARE SHOPIFY PRODUCT TAGS AND CATEGORIES?
Tags serve to describe your products, and narrow down a customer’s search, whereas categories are the product taxonomy, otherwise known as how it is displayed on the navigation menu. Further to this, collections are how you group your products based on similar attributes. In short, collections and categories group your products broadly, whereas tags are much more specific.
When creating your collections, or categories, you’ll need to choose a title and a description. The description is optional, but can be beneficial for SEO, as it’s another way to insert keywords and improve your search ranking. The title, however, is mandatory and requires some thought.
Think about what your customers are searching for, and which keywords they might be prone to using when looking for that product. For instance, if you have an online bookstore, you might use category titles such as “audiobooks”, or “ebooks”. Then, you might tag your products with things like “autobiography”, and “supernatural thriller”. So, a customer looking for a book about the First World War, and a customer looking for Obama’s autobiography won’t need to scan through all books marked e-book, or even all books in a “nonfiction” collection. This is an easy way for your customers to weed out what they don’t want, and quickly find what they do.
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If you’re growing your business, and don’t have time to individually title or tag all your products, you can also set a condition on Shopify, which is a set of rules that groups any new products into the relevant collection or category. For instance, you can hide any products that go out of stock by setting a condition to hide any products with an inventory stock level of 0.
Categories VS Collections
In the section above, we touched on both categories and collections. While they both serve the same purpose – grouping your products – there are slight differences that influence how and when you use them. Not sure how to manage your product inventory? Check out our guide to Product Information Management as well as our top PIM recommendations for ecommerce businesses.
Collections are related by a similar characteristic, allowing store owners to better manage inventory. These then appear on a collections page. Using the above bookstore example, you might create collections for “best books this year” and “as seen on booktok”, or “beach reads.”
Categories, on the other hand, serve to filter your products based on how you want them to appear on the main navigation bar, according to Shopify’s product taxonomy. So, in addition to the categories, you might create custom collections for your customers to navigate, such as “new this year,” and “top rated.” These can also appear in your navigation, by nesting the collection page link. This way, customers can easily see what you offer, and select the appropriate category to browse through. It all comes down to how you wish to streamline your inventory, and what feels right for your store.
A best practice to keep in mind when creating your categories is to ensure that they aren’t too niche. It’s great to have collections for exactly what you’re selling, but the more specific the collection name, the less searchable it becomes. Think of these as keywords, from the perspective of your customer. Collections such as “best books 2023” are widely searched, while still being specific enough to filter out some of your inventory, whereas a collection such as “presidential autobiographies” might be too detailed – unless of course, you specialize in autobiographies from political figures. Again, it’s all about knowing your own business, and your audience.
You can also create custom collections for specific things. For instance, during the wedding season, a clothing store might have a collection of “wedding guest dresses”.
Tags VS Categories
Now that we’ve established what a category is, and how it differs from collections, we can start looking at the role that tags have to play when organizing your products.
Tags are used to label your products with more detail, so that they can be narrowed down even further, within the same category or collection. An example of this could look something like this:
Collection: Best books of 2023
Sub-collection: History
Tags: 21st century history, first world war memoir
Pro Tip: If you’re struggling to come up with tags that suit your products, revisit your keyword list, and pull from there
Why Using These Functions is Important
It can be easy to simply choose a few collections or categories, and add your products to those, especially if you run a store without much product diversity. While this might be an effective way to organize your storefront at the beginning, it’s not efficient when you’re looking to scale, add new products, or even adjust your audience and messaging.
By having your products in collections or categories, and using tags for specific criteria, you’re helping your customers find the products they might not have found, otherwise. Try to envision your store if it were physical – if a customer wants a new pair of blue jeans, they will have a much easier time of it in a store like Zara, rather than at a yard sale.
ADDING COLLECTIONS AND CATEGORIES
Now that we understand how collections and categories work, and when to use them, we can start learning how to create them.
Automated VS Manual
When it comes to creating new collections, you have an option of doing it automatically, or manually.
Automatic collections add any related products to your collection through conditions. As we discussed earlier, conditions are criteria, or a set of rules, that Shopify pulls from when assigning products to a collection. This is a great way to manage your collections if you have a large inventory, as you only need to set up your conditions once, and then Shopify will do the rest when new products are added.
Manual collections, on the other hand, require you to assign the products to a collection yourself. This gives you more control, but can be tedious & takes extra time. You can fully customize what goes into your collection or category, but need to update it regularly, and by hand, individually adding products. This can be useful if you only have a small number of products, or are not looking to scale any time soon, such as seasonal offers.
Sub-Collections
Creating sub-collections is a great way to narrow down your inventory even further, and help your customers find exactly what they’re looking for. This works similarly to our collections and categories, wherein you first create the sub-collection and then add your products to it. Again, this can be done either manually or automatically, with preset conditions.
You can also display your sub-collections in your main menu, if relevant.
How to Add Products
Now that you know how to create your collections, it’s time to add some of your products. As mentioned, you can do this either manually or automatically.
- First create or open a product
- Click “product organization”
- If you’re doing it manually, select “collection” and choose which one. If you’re doing it automatically, you can skip this step
- Save
TAGS
Once you have your collections, subcollections, and categories all in place, it’s time to start tagging your products. Tags are essentially just labels that you can assign to your products to help organize your Shopify store. Including tags in your store structure can help improve the customer experience, as they can easily search for the exact products they need. This is especially important as you scale your business to grow. The wider and more diverse your product inventory, the harder it is to maintain it. Tags are a quick and easy way to organize yourself, while also helping the customer.
Pro Tip: not all Shopify themes display tags on the product page. If you are looking to include tags as a large part of your UX and SEO strategy, check whether your theme has the functionality for it. If you already have an established theme or website, don’t worry! You can also edit the code to allow for this.
Creating a tag strategy
Think of your tags like keywords. It’s fine to add obvious and relevant tags where you can, but having a strategy in place when tagging your products will be more impactful on your position in the search rankings. The biggest thing to keep in mind is your audience, and understanding what they want. If you can research and pinpoint your customer’s pain points – in the instance of our online bookstore, perhaps they are going on vacation and want a quick and fun book to read on the beach – you can then choose your keyword and tags appropriately.
How to add and remove tags
Once you’ve established your tag strategy, and chosen which tags to use, it’s time to add tags to your products. Follow the below steps in the backend of your Shopify store to add a tag:
- Open the product page
- Under “tags”, enter the keyword, or tag, you wish to assign to the product. You can also select this from a list of existing tags
- Save
To remove a tag, the steps are:
- Open the product page
- Click “x”, on the tag you want to remove
- Save
It’s as simple as that! You can also add or remove the tag from the “manage” section of that product page.
Pro Tip: do regular audits of your products, and ensure to remove any tags that are no longer relevant
Bulk actions
Another great thing about tagging your products is that you can perform bulk actions. Rather than go through and individually add tags to every product, you can bulk add tags, as well as bulk remove them, all in one go. This frees up time for you to focus on things that really matter to your business.
Tagging best practices
To ensure that your tags are working as effectively for your store as possible, there are some best practices to keep in mind when tagging your products. Shopify recommends sticking to the below guidelines:
- Characters: avoid special characters, and stick to using normal letters and numbers
- Length – try to keep your tags as short as possible. If you’re finding that you can’t fit it all into one tag, try splitting it into two. For example, the tag “blue ceramic dishwasher-safe mug” is not optimized. Try instead “blue” “dishwasher-safe” and “mug”
- Keep your tags simple to understand and easy to read
- Be clear in your tagging. Remember that certain themes show your tags in the drop-down menu, so try to avoid keyword stuffing
MAINTENANCE
Managing tags and collections
While getting all of your products into the relevant collections, adding to your navigation, and tagging them all appropriately is a massive feat, the work doesn’t stop there. It’s now up to you to maintain your tags and collections as new products come in, old products go out of stock, trends go in and out of season, and as your store grows and changes over time.
Then automate this process by bulk adding tags to your products as they come in. This is when having a good tagging strategy comes into play, as you won’t need to analyze each individual product and come up with a tag to add to it. You’ll have your predetermined tags just in reach, or already in an existing list. For example, if you add all your white t-shirts to your store at once, you can bulk add the tag “white t-shirt,” in one go.
Then, you can set up your automatic collections to add products according to specific tag criteria. Of course, it’s also best practice to spot-check and manually upload any outliers, as they come along.
Pro Tip: do regular audits of your tags and website as trends change, so that you can move around products or amend tags, to remain up to date in your industry
Third-party tools and integrations
It can be difficult to juggle all these organization tactics, while also running a business. It’s simple to add a tag here and there, or create a collection every now and again, but if you have a rapidly growing inventory, keeping on top of adding them to the website – let alone organizing or even optimizing them – can become impossible. Luckily, there are many tools available that automate this process and can free up the time that you need to focus on growing and expanding your eCommerce store.
Shopify offers third-party apps that can help with the organization process, to streamline your inventory management. Consider installing apps that can automate tagging or sorting. We recommend researching all the tools available and choosing the right one for you, that solves your specific pain points.
If you’d like to know more about how to automate optimizations for your Shopify store, check out our article on the best 15 Shopify listing optimization tools.
So, there you have it! How you can organize your product listings with Shopify tags and categories. There are endless pieces of information and resources about keeping your Shopify store in tip top shape. But, if you post & sell on other platforms, stay in the know by checking out all of our guides to optimizing your online business. We also have articles that deep-dive into optimizing another major part of your Shopify product page: your images. Have additional questions? You can always reach out to our team at hey@soona.co
