When a customer visits your website, they want to quickly navigate to the products they’re interested in buying. Shopify makes this easy by allowing you to create a collection. A collection allows you to organize your products into structured groups. Keep in mind, products can be a part of more than one collection.
This is beneficial as it helps your store to stay organized and it makes it an enjoyable experience for your customers as they’re browsing. Here are some examples of collections: clothes or products for men, women or children; best-selling products or sale items; products that are a certain color or material; seasonal products for holidays or special events.
There are two types of collections you can create, a manual collection and an automated collection. A manual collection includes only the products that you select individually. Manual collections take more work to create and maintain but there are a good choice for small or specialized collections that you intend to curate personally.
An automated collection uses selected conditions to automatically include matching products. This is ideal for businesses with a large inventory of products. You can add up to 60 selection conditions. And you can specify whether products need to meet all or any condition to be included in the collection.
Let’s set up a manual collection together. From your Shopify admin go to “Products,” then click Collections. Click “Create collection.” You want to be very clear and descriptive with your collection name.
Choose clarity over cleverness when naming your collection. In the collection type section, click “Manual.” Now click Save. In the Product section, search for the products or click “Browse” and then add the products that you want to have in the collection.
Set the sort order for how you want the products to be sorted in your store. Some Shopify themes give you a chance to add a collection image. If you do not choose a collection image, the image of your first product in your collection will be used. The search engine listing preview section shows a preview of how the collection will be displayed in search results.
If you want to edit this information, click “Edit website SEO.” Just like your product page SEO, you can edit this if you’d like. It’s a great way for search engines to find relevant collections. If you don’t want to have a collection description visible on your Collection page, be sure to add a description to the “Collection SEO” section so that it will be found by search engines. In the “Sales channel” section, click “Manage” to select the sales channels where you want your collection to be available.
When you’re just starting out, make your collection available on your online store. After watching the sales channel lesson later, you can come back and change this. In the collection image section, click “Add image” to upload the image for the collection.
You want an image that best represents the contents of the collection. Click Save. Click View to see your collection. If you’re coming to Shopify with a large inventory or as your business grows and you expand your inventory, automated collections will save you time and effort.
You now know the steps to set up a collection, and you’re one step closer to launching your online store. In the next lesson, I’ll show you how to add payments to your Shopify store.