2.3 | Adding Products to a Collection

Collections are used to group products so that they can be added to the menu or the home page to make it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for. Collections can also be used so that you can highlight a specific set of products on another product's page (more on that later).

Products can be in more than one collection, products can be added to collections manually or automatically based on certain conditions.

I prefer to use automated collections so that I know I haven't missed a product from a collection, but I will use manual collections for home page or discount purposes.

Sometimes I want to showcase a range of products on the homepage so I create a manual collection. If I am sharing a discount code and I only want it to be valid on full price products I add all products to a collection and then remove the ones that are on discounted or on clearance (and add discounted products back to the collection once the promo ends).

To add a manual collection

• Go to Products > Collections > Create collection
• Add the name of the collection under Title
• You can choose to add a description for the collection (good for SEO purposes) - most themes give the option to hide this description. If you choose not to add a description you should still edit the Search engine listing section at the bottom of the collection page
• Under Collection type choose Manual
• You will need to click Save in order for the Products section to appear
• Under Products in the Search products cell start typing the name of the products or click Browse
• In the Add products window click the product/s you would like to add to the collection
• Click Done
• You can also choose how you would like the products in the collection to be sorted by default. Customers can change this at any time but you might want to be strategic about which products they see first in a collection
  
  

 

To add an automated collection

• Go to Products > Collections > Create collection
• Add the name of the collection under Title
• You can choose to add a description for the collection (good for SEO purposes) - most themes give the option to hide this description. If you choose not to add a description you should still edit the Search engine listing section at the bottom of the collection page
• Under Collection type the option should default to Automated
• You can choose to add products to the collection based on;
  • Product title
  • Product type
  • Product category
  • Product vendor
  • Product tag
  • Price
  • Compare-at price
  • Weight
  • Inventory stock
  • Variant's title
• You can add several conditions and tell Shopify that you want to create a collection that includes products that match all conditions or any conditions
• Then click Save
• The collection will auto-populate. Automated collections are easy to edit and update at any time.

Collection examples

Example one

You want visitors to your online store to be able to shop by product type as well as by brand.

Create automated collections for each product type (Product type > is equal to > *choose product type* - save and repeat). Then create automated collections for each brand (Product vendor > is equal to > *choose product type* - save and repeat). We will go through how to add these different collections to the menu in another chapter.

Example two

You have a range of old season or end of line products that you would like to clear.

You can either create a manual collection and add these products, or you can tag each of the products that you would like to clear with "On sale" or "Clearance" (the Bulk edit screen is probably easiest for this) and create an automated collection (Product tag > is equal to > Clearance).

For a superior customer experience it's nice to remove from the collection all of the items that you have sold out of that you won't be restocking (that way customers aren't distracted by what they missed out on and instead are focused on what they can buy instead!), you can Add another condition and choose Inventory stock > is greater than > 0 then those items will fall out of the collection.

You can also choose to sort this collection to ensure the products you most want to clear are shown first (these might be the cheapest, or the ones you have the most of or the ones you make the most margin on).

Example three

You have a product and there are other complimentary products that you want to highlight to visitors who land on this product page. If you sell skincare, it might be other products in the routine, if you sell clothing, it might be a matching item, if it's a new product it might be other new products.

This one is pretty time consuming, so you might want to revisit this post-launch, but you can create a manual collection that includes the specific products you want to showcase on a certain product or collection page and then add it to the product or collection page to control the other products that customers see (as opposed to relying on Shopify to make good choices with the Related products default selection).

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