When you're an online merchant with a digital storefront, one of the most important tasks is optimizing your products in taxonomy to create a seamless customer experience. Nail this process down, and it becomes much easier for consumers to find exactly what they're looking for - especially if your store has a large inventory.
Producing a product page requires little tech know-how or website design skills.
However, arranging your inventory pages in a way that's less confusing for your visitors takes a little more finesse.
Creating specific product types that fit into categories is one of the most common ways to create an enjoyable, straightforward shopping experience. It's also important to ensure your store's search function is dialed in, so customers are landing on the right pages and being shown the right products.
If you own a Shopify store, all of this is accomplished by creating Shopify Product types. We've compiled all the necessary info into an easy-to-follow guide that even the greenest e-commerce store owner can understand.
What is a Shopify Product Type?
To put it simply, a Shopify product type is a designation or label for products that make
it much easier to organize them in your digital store. Things like tools, electronics, jewelry, and beauty supplies are all great examples of product types.
Product types play a significant role in the journey of an online shopper, extending far beyond providing a designation of the type of products a customer is looking for. These categories are also used for certain apps that recommend similar items that might interest a consumer as they navigate towards checkout.
Items labeled with similar keywords can trigger complimentary or add-on products that a consumer might find useful, or make the initial product easier to use. Using tags, Shopify store owners can go from here to create collections (groups of similar items as mentioned above). An automated collection leverages product tags to offer items at the right time.
Shopify Stores and Shopify Product Types
Taxonomy is the term used to describe the way online store owners group and itemize their inventory. A taxonomy, or a type, of product is identified in multiple ways, including by product type, vendor, or tag.
Many Shopify store owners - especially newcomers, run into confusion regarding these labels. It's important to find some form of clarity when it comes to these designations, as they're such an integral part of any successful Shopify store.
Grouping by Vendors
Whoever is responsible for sourcing your products is known as your vendor. By using the vendor classification to itemize your inventory, it makes re-ordering product much simpler.
Do you have a high demand for a specific item or segment of products in your store? Have you had difficulties ordering and the right amount and types of these products?
For example, the right sizes of a certain type of shoe.
When you're managing your inventory, filtering through all of these labels, streamlining the process is much easier as a fair amount of manual work is eliminated.
Types of Products
The type of product is an important designation for any item in your inventory. Grouping items using this tag isn't much different than using the vendor tag, as many products will only fall under one specific type.
Qualities of different product types and other characteristics may further break these down. Certain apps can take this even further, deploying other shopping, marketing, and other strategies to help you leverage different creatives and other strategies.
Using Tags
Tags could be the most useful/important label, especially considering how heavily your store's search function weighs on the optimization of your tags. Owners may choose to customize tags on their own, or allow the theme to designate groups of tags.
Using Product Type In Shopify
Many store owners are easily confused regarding the process of adding product types in their stores. However, it's actually a simple job - broken down step-by-step in the list below.
1- Navigate to your Products
After choosing "Products," you'll want to click "Add a Product." This leads you to a section allowing you to add a title, description, pictures, etc.
2 - Organize Types of Products
You have full control over the organization of your inventory by leveraging the right-hand side panel.
3 - Product Status
Drop the menu down on the Product Status area and you'll be able to select the type of organization you'd like. If necessary, you can type the name of a new product type and save it for automatic use later. Save all your progress, and you're done.
Using Product Types - The Right Way
Now that everything is grouped the way you want it, it's important to learn how to efficiently use all these grouped inventory products to make your store run like a well-oiled machine. The next step entails setting up different circumstances, allowing you to leverage the power of these product types in the most efficient way.
Automated Collections
When you have a collection that consists of certain item types, you'll need to choose what type product type is equal to. Actually, you're choosing a "condition" that the product type equals.
By using the condition correctly, the different product types are populated. Regardless of what you choose, it's critical that any condition you select for a product needs to match the section it's equal to before any purchase is made. Using this example, only compatible items or complimentary items are able to be grouped with items under certain conditions.
Using Tags
If you'd like to use the condition you've create, then the condition you chose for the product tag to be equal to would be the section or category that contains the other products you selected.
It sounds. tedious, but store owners may upload tags in bulk, eliminating a significant amount of time. Already-created tags may be used or you can opt to create your own variations.
Difference Between Product Types and Collections
Many store owners get confused regarding the differences between product types and collections. The primary difference is that collections are used to assist your shoppers to find t the products they want as fast as possible. Collections are to help your customers find similar, variants, or additional products and encourage upsells.
Are both of these required? Neither of these are required as a Shopify store owner, but they certainly don't hurt your cause. Product types are simpler, but assist your shoppers much more than you originally thought.
Using collections is a bit more intricate, and requires more planning prior to deploying this strategy. It's important to be aware of a "map" to use to segment your collections, and use them in a way that makes sense to your customers and the shopping process as a whole.
It's worth noting - and you should be warned, that half-heartedly using collections or not devising the right strategy can hurt your store. It's easy to have a huge mess on your hands much faster than you could imagine - and it's not fun to work backwards to clean things issues up on Shopify.
Optimizing Your Store Using Product Categories
There's so many ways for shop owners to enhance the way they sell products on Shopify. It seems like a substantial amount of action is going on at once, and while leveraging a custom product type or product tags, the name of the game is optimizing the way customers find products and interact with your store.
Your main function should always be to keep your products organized, give your customers a better understanding of your product list or inventory, and keep a clean page. Stick to this strategy, and there's no reason you can't have several Shopify stores turning tremendous profits.
FAQ
What is a product variant?
A product variant is a taxonomy used in Shopify to label an alternative form of a product within your inventory. Variants can be extremely useful, especially in your customer's experience and giving them the opportunity for additional or multiple options.
Optimizing your store and including product variants gives your customers access to the same product but in different varieties - a green drill, a red rill, a black drill - you get the idea. Creating products variants is as easy as altering the metadata for the chosen products's SKU.
Product variants can also be extremely powerful when it comes to standing out from the competition or distancing your brand from competing brands. These can become really powerful if you have items in your store that the competition doesn't have variations of. Product variants can also be used to drive sales in general or push upsales.
Where can I find "product type" in Shopify?
Product types show up all throughout your Shopify store. This happens whether you have digital or physical goods. These could be considered certain product types. This can be broken down even further by categorizing more specifically.
Physical products: Books, jewelry, clothes, beauty/cosmetics, tools, electronics, pet toys, etc.
Digital products: E-Books, Video Tutorials, Masterclasses, Guides, music downloads (singles or whole albums), movies, etc.
Digital products can be categorized into product types "subscription" and "service." Services may include mentoring, teaching, consulting, coaching, or any other direct transfer of information. Subscription categories might include food subscriptions, cologne or perfume subscriptions, the shoes-of-the-month-club - the possibilities are endless.
What's a good example of a product type in Shopify?
Referencing the the hierarchy types of products are a great example of product types. For example, a dog supply store hierarchy might include:
Dog food
Dog toys
Dog clothes
Dog beds
Dog leashes
Dog training products
This type of hierarchy can exist in nearly every type of store imaginable.
How will you use product types in Shopify?
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