4.2 Products and Collections

You’re back! Let’s go back to the screen that opened up after we first set up our store. Now, this is your Shopify Admin dashboard, from where you’ll have access to all the important parts of the store. 

There’s orders, products, customers, analytics, marketing, discounts, apps, your sales channels and your online store. We’ll cover most of these in the next few chapters. 

For now, let’s start with Products and Collections. 

Depending on how many products you plan to offer, adding and organizing your product listings can be the most time-consuming step during store setup.

Organizing your store is worth the work, though: it makes it easier for your customers to use and helps them quickly find the products that they want.

1. From your Admin Dashboard, click on Products.
2. Now, hit Add product.
   
   
3. You’ll see this screen. The first thing is to add in a title for your product. Let’s add in one of our Kicks - the Rose Synthetic Sneaker. Next, we add a description. Remember, this is what your consumer sees, so be creative! 
   

4. Then, the Media. What is an ecommerce store without the most dazzling images? Ineffective. Let’s go ahead and add our image. We’re just adding one here, but you can add more. In fact, we recommend that you do. It’s more compelling for the buyer to see multiple images.
   
   
5. Next, we have Price. Now, the first option is the price your consumer will see and pay for the product. Let’s say 1500. The second option, “Compare at price”, is a way to show a discount. Add in a higher price in this section, say 2000, so shoppers can see the difference. The final option, “cost per item”, is what the product actually costs you, so you can see your margin and profit.
   
   
6. In inventory you can add the SKU (or, stock keeping unit) and the barcode. This isn’t necessary right now, but a lot of stores do choose to use it, so Shopify has the option. You then add in the quantity, which is the number of units you have - let’s say 50.
   
   
7. Add in the weight, along with any customs information, if required.
   
   
8. Now, if the same product has different variants, you can add that right here. Let’s say size. On the right, you can type in all the sizes that this product is available in. Next, colour and material. If you don’t have different colours or material, simply remove all of these options. If you’ve added different variants, you’ll have to add the price, quantity and SKU for each of them.
   
   
9. Now scroll back to the top, and on the right you’ll find “Product status”, which is currently a draft. Go ahead and change the status to Active. Below that you’ll find the tab “Organisation”, where you can add other details like Product type---- in this case, shoes. You can also add tags, like classic, vintage, modern and so on.
   
   
10. On the top right corner, click the Save button.
    
    And there we go! You’ve just added a product. You can hit Preview to see how this looks on the actual store. Pretty slick, don’t you think? 
    

See how easy that was?  Let’s keep this momentum going, and move on to Collections. 

A collection is basically a grouping of products that merchants can create to make their stores easier to browse.  Here’s a good example of products grouped into collections. 

Remember that the exact layout and appearance of your collection pages, will depend on your theme.

We’ve gone ahead and added in a few more products to our store, following the same process we just showed you. 

Now we have 5 sneakers up. On your dashboard, under products, you’ll find “Collections”. Click on that, and then on “Create Collection”. You’ll see a similar page open up. 

Now let’s say these 5 sneakers are a part of our Classic collection. So we’re gonna put in the title right here. We’ll then add in a description for this Classic Collection.

On the right, you’ll find “Collection Image” - this is the main image that represents your collection. Choose one and upload. 

There are two types of collections:

An automated collection uses selection conditions to automatically include matching products. You can add up to 60 selection conditions. You can also specify whether products need to meet all of the conditions OR just a few of them to be included in the collection. 

For example, here we’ve added that products must match, “product tag” “is equal to” “classic”. What this means is that every product that is tagged as classic will automatically be included in the classic collection. Makes sense? 

Automated collections are usually preferred because, after you set up the conditions, future products are automatically added. You can save a lot of time by using automated collections if you have a large selection of products or if you have seasonal or rotating inventories. 

We’ll get to Manual.

Back to the collection. Click the Save button on the bottom right here. Done! your classic collection is created! Go back, and you’ll find the collection right here.

Since this is just so simple, let’s build another collection. 

You know the drill. 

Add a title & description. 

Let’s choose Manual this time. 

Select an image and hit Save.

Now, a manual collection includes only the products that you individually choose. Because of this, the collection always contains the same products, unless you specifically add or remove products. So, let’s start manually adding these products. Select “Browse”, and choose the sneakers that are a part of the Street Collection. Then Add them. 

There you go, your street collection now has 3 sneakers. Click on view to see how your collection looks on the store. As we said earlier, the look of your collection depends on the theme chosen, which we’ll get to in the next episode. 

Now remember, manual collections take more work to maintain, but they can be a great choice for small or specialized collections that you intend to personally curate.

For example, if you plan to hold a one-time flash sale of just a few products, you can create a manual collection for them and set up a discount for just the products in that collection.

I hope your store is coming alive, slowly but surely. We’re going to dive into setting up a theme and designing your pages next! Let’s go.