The Difference Between Shopify Products And Collections
When setting up a Shopify store, there is a lot of terminology to learn.
Two that you will want to know inside and out are Shopify products and collections. After all, you are running an online store designed to sell items!
Well-organised products are essential for an online store. You want it to be an easy and user-friendly experience for people to locate and purchase items on your Shopify site.
But you don’t just want to stop there. You also want to make it simple for people to browse and explore other related products.
So, let’s take a look at how to organise your online items and the difference between Shopify products and collections.
The Difference Between Shopify Products and Collections
Shopify Products and Collections - What’s The Difference?
These two terms might seem quite similar, but they are actually two distinctly different things. Understanding how each should be used within Shopify will improve the experience for your website visitors.
What’s A Product?
Depending on your business and industry, your ‘products’ might be physical items, services, or digital downloads. When you add a product into your Shopify store, you enter in your product details and add in the related images. You can then update and organise your products and product variants from the Shopify Products admin page.
You will also need to assign a “type” to the products you upload. This specifies the top level grouping such as dresses, suits, footwear, etc. A product can only have one type, but it can belong to multiple collections.
What’s A Collection?
Collections are groups of products that can be categorised to make them easier for customers to find. You can group products by price, sizes, colours, seasonal items, themes, or sale items – anything you like!
Collections can be presented on your store as a page with a photo gallery of items. Customers can click through to the product page by selecting the images. You can also add links in your navigation menu to your collections to make them easy to find. You can see and update your collections in the Shopify Collections admin page.
Now that we are clear on the differences between the two terms, let’s dive deeper into utilising collections to their full potential.
Automated vs. Manual Collections
There are two different types of collections that you can create for your online store.
Automated Collections will add related or matching items into your collections for you automatically. This uses ‘selection conditions’ which help you to specify which products will be auto added to the collection.
You can use up to 60 conditions per collection and you can also choose whether a product has to meet all of the conditions to be added to a collection, or just some of them. Then, when you add a new product to your store that matches some or all of the conditions, it will be automatically added to the collection. Easy as!
Manual Collections will only include the particular products that you have individually selected. They require more work to maintain and update, but they do allow for a more personal and specialised touch. These can be great for seasonal or one-off sale events, as you can set up a smaller manual collection and simply remove the collection when the event is over.
Which is better?
Many Shopify uses prefer to use automated collections because they take less time. Once you have set up the collections and conditions, everything else is taken care of every time you upload a new product.
It is good to note, however, that you cannot remove products from an automated collection once they are in there. That is unless you change the conditions or edit the product to no longer suit the conditions.
Struggling with your Shopify products and collections? Then we can help you get them sorted here at Creative Web Designs. Get in touch with us today to find out more about our Shopify support packages.