Depending on how many products you have in your Shopify store, it’s useful to plan how you want to organise them. You can use three methods, each with pros and cons.
Method 1: Categorised Shopify collections
This is the standard way of categorising products by simply adding them into appropriately named collections. For example, you may have collections like:
- Computer memory
- Hard drives
- Monitors
- Keyboards
- Mice
This method is good if you don’t have many products, or your products don’t need to be subcategorised in any way. Each item above is a collection, so you have complete control over the page content.
Method 2: Use filtered Shopify collections
Shopify can add a filter to each collection which is very useful if you have many products within a collection, and they can be narrowed down via different criteria. Filters can be product attributes or metafields and it’s all manageable via editing products.
So for example, if we can reformat the list above to include filters:
- Computer memory
- Hard Drives
- SSD
- HD
- Monitors
- Keyboards
- Wired keyboards
- Wireless keyboards
- Technical keyboards
- Full size
- Mini
- Mice
This method allows flexibility in how the products can be attributed and allow for a nice sidebar to be added to the collection pages. Once the sidebar is added and set up, Shopify does its magic, so there’s no additional work required.
The downside of this method is that the URL structure isn’t very nice and can get long due to all the query string parameters. Only the parent pages (computer memory, hard drives, monitors, etc.) are collections, so collection descriptions can only be added to those.
This is probably not the best option if you want these filtered pages to be indexed in Google.
Method 3: Tagged Shopify collections
This method is similar to 2 in that it “filters” existing collections, but using product tags instead. This isn’t as automated as the filters method above, but it does produce much cleaner urls which are better for SEO. The URLs are in the format /collections/keyboard/wired; the second segment is the actual collection, and the third is the tag.
You can use link lists to manage your store’s navigation to include tagged collections. Like method 2, the collection description is only available on the parent pages.
Less development is required for this method as it only requires the links to be added to your store’s navigation.
Final thoughts
Remember, it’s important to organise your store in a way that makes it easy for customers to find what they’re looking for. So choose the method that works best for your store and your customers.