Join Patrick Rauland for an in-depth discussion in this video Maximize categorization, part of Shopify Essential Training.
- [Instructor] Imagine you're looking to buy a home. How do you find that home with the amenities you want? Do you type in the exact street address and press the Buy Now button or do you filter your search and find the right type of house, narrow it down further by price, then tour it and finally buy it? Using search combined with filters is generally how people buy things online, too. There's simply too much information and too many options that people love browsing by some sort of filter. A good rule of thumb is that if you have more than 10 products, you should add some sort of categorization.
We're right around the 10 product mark in our store, so we could add categories if we want. Creating categories in Shopify is pretty easy, but I wanted to take a minute to explain the theory behind categorization. You want your categories to be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. The second part, collectively exhaustive, means it covers all of your products. You want a descriptive category name that covers everything. Try not to have a miscellaneous category, that's the equivalent of a junk drawer. Many users won't find those products and you want categories that are mutually exclusive.
So, in clothing, men's shirts and women's shirts tend to be very different styles, and very rarely do they overlap. These are good categories. Bad categories might be red shirts and maroon shirts. Plenty of those shirts are going to be in both categories, these are bad categories. I'd recommend you remove the maroon shirts category and put everything under red shirts. So, use mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories. This will help users browse your site to find the products they want. Let's look at how we can create these categories for our store.
I'll scroll down to our Diamond Kite and on the Edit Product page, we can see an Organization tab where we can see Product type, Vendor, Collections, and Tags. Product type is basically a category, so we can click this box and select from one of our existing categories, although we have none, or we can just type in a new category. So, we could just say Diamond Kite, which is actually a type of kite, and we could add it, although, in this case, we only have one on our site, so I won't do that. Vendor is another way to organize our products.
This is great for brand names. So, if you sell sneakers, you might have a vendor of Nike. Fill this out if you have it, although, if you aren't working with well-known brands or if you have your own product, you don't have to fill this out. There's two more ways to organize your products, Collections and Tags. Think of Collections as a way to feature products, so a category might be men's shirts, a collection might be fall clothing which will include a few shirts, a few pants, a hat, and a vest, and later in this course, we'll cover how you can show a collection on the front page of your store.
For Blue Sky Kites, a great collection would be beginner kites since kites are so often a children's toy. So, we can make it obvious to parents which kites would be good for their kid. For most of the options under Organization, we can add them right here, but for Collections, we actually have to go to a separate menu. I'll open Collections in a new tab and I'll click Create Collection. I'll call this Beginner's Kites. We can add a description if we want and a few extra options, although, for right now, I'm going to select Manually select products and I'll click Save Collection.
I'll go back to my product page, I'll refresh this, and I'll select Beginner's Kites from the options. Lastly, there are tags. These are yet another way to organize products. I like to use tags for unique features. So, I'll save this, I'll go back to my list of products, and I'll open up the Butterfly Kite that I added in between some of the videos. We probably don't need to have a category for Butterfly Kites, but if we grow our catalog, it might be nice to let people who like butterflies to be able to search for them by clicking on the tag.
So, I'll scroll down and I'll type in Butterfly, and click Add. And when you're done, go ahead and click Save. The one thing you don't want to do with your organization is duplicate anything, so don't have a fall collection and a fall tag. That's confusing for users and for search engines. It will hurt you more than it will help, so pick the best fit and apply it to all of your products. Remember, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive, and you don't have to do any of these.
The only one I'd recommend to the majority of stores are categories. You can always add tags, collections, and vendors later.