Shopify is an affordable eCommerce platform that provides a content management system (CMS) for building and running an online store from scratch. By limiting the content you need to create — products, pages, and optional blog — you can easily have a Shopify store up and running in less than an hour. Keep reading to find out everything you need to know about how to add products to Shopify.
How to Add Products to Shopify
Products displayed on your Shopify site may seem to be simple and straightforward to the customer but there are many building blocks that must be considered. The following are the most important features of an effective product page.
Collectively, adding information to all of these fields will make your products much more enticing. Some of the fields may be skipped as they are optional, but most of them are important for a good shopping experience.
Title and Description
A product is known by its title. The title plays an important role on the product page to tell customers what the product is about. It’s equivalent to the name of the product, and it’s very helpful if the title contains the product’s attributes. It’s also used to search for the product in the website’s search bar.
The description explains the product, including features and any information to help convince visitors to add it to their shopping cart. The description can contain text, images, and videos.
Images
- Featured Images
- Image Gallery
Every product on your site should have a visual presentation of how it looks. In the past, companies would hire professional photographers and models to do photoshoots of their products, however, today it’s possible to create high-quality images yourself with an affordable light box, a smartphone, and possibly some photo editing software. (If you’re on a budget, try the free open-source graphics editor GIMP.)
A product needs to have a featured image that will appear on the product page and collections page. It’s also good to have other relevant images in your product image gallery to support the featured image. A product may have as many images as you like, but we recommend showing no more than six.
Pricing
- Price
- Compare at Price
- Cost per Item
- Tax
There are three different types of prices you can set in Shopify.
- Price is the amount you are selling the product for.
- Compare at price is basically the original price of the product before any discount offer.
- Cost per item is the amount you pay as a vendor for each product. (This information is not shown to customers on your website.)
The final pricing consideration for your product is tax. If the product is taxable, you need to enable “Charge tax on this product” and Shopify will automatically determine the total price during checkout. There are different percentages of applicable tax that are automatically calculated by the Shopify system. There are also Shopify apps available for special cases where you need to apply custom tax percentages.
Organization
- Product Type
- Vendor
- Collections
- Tags
The product type is one of the important building blocks of your Shopify store. For example, if your store sells clothing, you can group your products by product type like tops, bottoms, and dresses. This helps provide better search results for customers who are looking for a specific product category. This field can be used as a top level collection to categorize products.
Vendors are basically the brand or supplier of the product. You may have many vendors in a Shopify store. This field helps organize products in the backend. It might not have any specific functionality for customers.
Collections are another important building block of a great product page. Through collections, Shopify can gather similar products into a group, allowing customers to browse through closely related products rather than trying to find products that have no collection assigned to them. Collections are also helpful for upselling and cross-selling.
(Note: It’s possible to assign a featured image for each collections page to help visually highlight the products associated with that collection. It’s also good to add SEO information for each collections page to make your Shopify site more SEO-friendly.)
Similar to collections, tags are also used for filtering products. A product might have many different tags assigned to it as compared to collections which should be limited to broad categories. You can use tags for the product’s attributes. For example, a shirt might have a tag for spring, summer, fall, or winter based on the clothing’s seasonality. If a tag is deleted from all products, it automatically disappears from the website. Unlike other CMS, Shopify does not provide any tag management interface by default.
Product Availability
You can add different channels that the product can be sold through. For example, your Shopify store, Instagram, Facebook, POS system, and so on. Through this option, you can determine which channels you want to make a product available. You can hide products from different channels through this option as well.
Inventory
- SKU
- Barcode
- Track Quantity
- Continue selling when out of stock
You can set your inventory through the Shopify product page. An inventory determines the number of available products in a store. For effective inventory management, you need to add the following details.
Normally the “inventory managed by field” option is not available, but if you add a Shopify app that is capable of controlling the product inventory, this option becomes visible. There are POS apps and dropshipping apps that can control inventory.
The stock keeping unit (SKU) determines the unique identifier for the product. This can be made up of numbers, letters, or a mixture of both. It’s advisable to keep unique SKUs for all of your products, even unique SKUs for product variants.
The barcode number is used for barcode readers. It also needs to be unique for all products and their variants.
If you want to track quantity, then you must enter a number of available products. If you don’t want to track your inventory, you can uncheck the box and it will not track the quantity of the product and its variants.
You can set the continue selling when out of stock option so even if your product is out of stock, it’s still available for purchase. This can only be selected if the product quantity is tracked.
Variants
Variants are very important to set when you have different versions of the same product. You can set variants by color, size, length, etc. For each variant, you can set its own inventory, you can also add multiple images for that specific variant.
Shipping
- Weight
- Country of Origin
- HS Code
If you’re selling physical products through your Shopify store, you need to set up shipping information. You can set a few attributes for shipping during your product creation process.
Weight is an important factor for determining shipping cost. Normally, shipping is calculated based on the weight of the product.
If you’re selling your products to international customers, you also need to add the product’s country of origin.
HS code stands for harmonized system code. In the event that you need to ship your products internationally, you should enter an HS code for the product. This helps determine the type of product and directions for customs authorities to apply the correct taxes.
Search Engine List Preview
- Page Title
- Description
- URL and Handle
Search engine optimization is one of the most important aspects of having your products show up organically in Google’s search results. You need to set a page title that is SEO friendly, the description of the product should be written to entice people to click on the link, and the URL and handle (or slug) needs to be set in order to make sure that your products are indexed by different search engines.
Gift Cards
The gift cards option is not available in basic shopify accounts. This feature lets you create digital gift card products in your Shopify store. Gift cards can be purchased by customers as a gift to their friends or family; they can also be used to offer discounts to loyal customers.
Metafields
Like other CMS and eCommerce systems, metafields help you add to the product’s information and options. They are not available through the product creation / editing interface by default but some Shopify apps can add new metafields to the product page.
Uploading Products to Shopify Makes Building Your Store Even Easier
If your Shopify store is small, it’s easy to manually add each product into your system one by one. However, if you need to add more than a few products at once, it can be a lot easier to use a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to create a .csv file that lists all of your products you want to add to your store. Shopify can read the file and automatically create each product page along with the attributes and information provided in the file.
It does take a basic understanding of spreadsheets in order to create new products in this way, and the efficiency comes from using the spreadsheet’s copy and paste functions to quickly add required information for each product. For help on creating a .csv file for Shopify products, we suggest reading through Shopify’s .csv Upload Guide or watching the video below.
