Product & Collection

Your products are the goods, digital downloads, services, and gift cards that you sell. You add a product in Shopify by entering product details and uploading product images. If your product has options, like size or color, then you can add a variant (the different versions of a product, such as size or color.) for each combination of options.

When you are adding or updating a product, you can make the product available to one or more of your sales channels.

You view, add, update, and organize all of your products and variants from the Products page in the Shopify admin.

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Variants

You add variants to a product that comes in more than one option, such as size or color. Each combination of options for a product is a variant for that product.

For example, suppose that you sell T-shirts with two options: size and color. The size option has three values: small, medium, and large. The color option has two values: blue and green. One specific variant from these options is a small, blue T-shirt.

You can see how many variants a product has in the Inventory column of the Products page.

For products that don't have any variants, the Pricing, Inventory, and Shipping sections are shown on the product details page. After you add variants, those sections are no longer shown on the product details page.

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Collections

You can group your products into collections to make it easier for customers to find them by category. Here are a few examples of collections that you might create:

clothes for men, women, or children
items of a certain type, such as lamps, cushions, or rugs
items on sale
items in a certain size or color
seasonal products, such as holiday cards and decorations

After you create a collection, it can be shown on your online store as a webpage with a gallery of the products that are in the collection. Your customers can then click a product image on the collection page to visit a specific product's page. You can help customers find and view collections by adding links to the collections in a menu in your store's navigation.

The exact layout and appearance of collection pages depends on your theme.

You can view, create, and edit collections from the Collections page of your Shopify admin.

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Selling gift cards

A gift card is a special type of product. Its value can be used as payment toward future orders from your online store.

The gift card feature is available on the Shopify plan and above.

You can sell a gift card like any other product. You can also issue a gift card to a customer for free as a reward or incentive. When you fulfill an order with a gift card, the customer receives an email that contains a unique gift card code that they can use at checkout to redeem its value:

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Importing and exporting products

If you want to transfer a large amount of product information between Shopify and another system, then you can use a specially-formatted spreadsheet to import or export that data. Shopify uses CSV (comma-separated value) files to perform this kind of bulk task.

If you're transferring information from Oberlo, then see Dropshipping with Oberlo instead.

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Searching for products and filtering your product list

All your products are listed in the Products area in Shopify. 50 products are listed on each page. To organize the list of products, and to find products in a list that spans many pages, you can sort, search, and filter the list.

By default, your product list is sorted alphabetically (from A to Z) by product name.

The way that your products are sorted or filtered in the Products area of the admin doesn't affect how your products are shown in your online store. If you need to change the way that your products appear to customers in your online store, then change the sort order for the products in a collection.

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Managing inventory

Inventory is the quantity of a particular product that is available for sale.

Inventory tracking can help you avoid selling products that have run out of stock, or let you know when you need to order or make more of your product. You can set up inventory tracking, view your inventory, and adjust your inventory counts in the Inventory area of Shopify. You can also view the history of inventory adjustments for products and variants whose inventory is being tracked by Shopify.

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Selling services or digital products

When you add a product to your store, you can uncheck the shipping checkbox to indicate that you are selling a digital product or service instead of a physical product. If you're selling a digital product, then you'll also need to use an app to provide a download link to your product.

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Metafields

You can use metafields to add custom fields to objects such as products, customers, and orders. Metafields are useful for storing specialized information, such as part numbers, customer titles, or blog post summaries. They can be used by apps and channels to track data for internal use.

For example, you can use metafields in the following ways:

Add fields to a resource (such as a product, product variant, or customer).
Customize the appearance of your storefront and show more information.
Store and transfer data between your store and another ecommerce system such as a CRM, ERP, or IMS.
Track internal data that an app needs.

You need to use an app to create and manage metafields.

Metafields have three parts:

Namespace - A category or container that differentiates your metadata from other metafields.
Key - The name of the metafield.
Value - The content of the metafield. In most cases, the value is what will be displayed on the storefront or used by the app.

For more examples, see The metafield object.