What are Shopify collections and how to set them up (a complete guide)

If you run a Shopify store, chances are you have hundreds or even thousands of products to display on your website. While options are good, consumers want to find relevant products fast. And collections are a brilliant way to do that. 

Shopify collections allow you to organize your products and make it easy for customers to find what they're looking for on your store. 

What are Shopify Collections? 

Essentially, collections are groups of products that you can create on your shop to make it easier for customers to find what they're looking for. For example, if you sell clothes, you might want to create separate collections for men's clothing, women's clothing, and children's clothing.

You can use collections to group products by type, season, occasion, or any other way that makes sense for your business. Here are some examples:

• Occasion/event-based collections: Examples include a "Wedding" collection offering wedding dresses, bridesmaid dresses, and bridal accessories. An "Outdoor Adventure" collection could include camping gear, hiking equipment, and bicycles.

• Top-selling products: A collection of your best-selling products, organized by sales volume. This is a great way to showcase your most popular items and increase conversion rates.

• New arrivals: A collection of your newest products, designed to show off your latest offerings and encourage customers to stay up-to-date with your store.

• Seasonal collections: Perfect for promoting seasonal items or running special promotions. For example, a summer collection could include all of your swimwear, beach accessories, and suncare products. A winter collection could include all of your cold-weather gear, such as coats, hats, and gloves.

• Featured Products: This collection allows you to hand-pick a selection of products that you want to feature prominently on your store.

• Clearance sale: A great way to get rid of old stock or promote seasonal products that are about to go out of style. 

So how are collections different from your product catalog? The main difference between Shopify collections and product catalogs is that Shopify collections are designed to help you organize and showcase your products in a specific way to build a pleasant browsing and shopping experience. On the other hand, product catalogs are designed to help you manage your inventory.

So why should you optimize your Shopify collections? 

Here are three good reasons why you should invest in optimizing your Shopify collections to leave your prospects with an incredible shopping experience - 

• Better customer and navigation experience - Shopify collections offer a more streamlined way for customers to browse and navigate your store. By grouping products into collections, customers can easily find what they're looking for without having to search through your entire catalog.

• Improved inventory management and merchandising - By grouping products into collections, you can easily keep track of your stock levels and ensure that the right products are being promoted to the right customers. Collections also make it easy to change the order in which products are displayed on your store, so you can highlight new arrivals or seasonal items. You can also use Shopify collections to develop dynamic pricing strategies. For example, you could create a collection of clearance items and offer discounts on those items to move them quickly.

• Boosting products, sales, and marketing campaigns - Let's say you're running a sale on women's clothing. You could create a collection called "Women's Clothing Sale" and include all of the relevant products. Then, you could promote this collection on your website and social media, and even run ads specifically targeting this collection.

Types of Shopify Collections

Shopify supports two types of collections -

• Manual collections : Manual collections are created and managed by the store owner. They give the store owner complete control over which products are included. This is useful for creating curated groups of products, or for separating products into different categories (such as seasonality).

• Automated collections : Automated collections are generated automatically by Shopify based on rules that the owner sets. They can be used to create dynamic collections that update automatically based on specific criteria, making it easy to keep your products organized and up-to-date. Shopify allows merchants to choose up to 60 conditions. 

These include conditions like product type, price, vendor, or tag. For example, you could create a rule that says "all products tagged with 'new' should be added to the 'New Arrivals' collection." Once rules are created, Shopify will automatically add (or remove) products from the appropriate collections as needed.

Automated collections are also flexible, so you can change the conditions as needed and even have multiple automated collections with different criteria.

Components of Shopify Collections 

Let’s take a look at the different components of Shopify collections -

• Category name: This is the name of the overall collection, and it shows up at the top of the page.

• Breadcrumbs: The breadcrumb is a trail of links that shows the user's current location within the store. By default, Shopify includes the collection's name as the last link in the breadcrumb. For example, if a user is viewing a product in the "T-Shirts" collection, the breadcrumb would look like: Home > T-Shirts > Product name

• Pages: Collections can be assigned to pages in order to control their layout and structure. When assigning a collection to a page, you can choose whether to display it as a grid or list, how many products per row, and how many products per page.

• Browse By: The browse by feature allows customers to filter products by specific criteria, such as price range, color, size, etc. This makes it easy for customers to find exactly what they're looking for on your website.

• Filter menu: The filter menu allows customers to further refine their search by narrowing down the results based on certain criteria. For example, if they're looking for a particular type of product, they can use the filter menu to only show results that match that criteria.

• Product details: Each product in a collection has its own individual page where customers can view all of the information about that product. This page will include things like product descriptions, pricing information, shipping & return policy details, customer reviews, and related products.

How to add Collections to your Shopify store 

To add a collection to your Shopify store:

1. From your Shopify admin, go to Products > Collections.
2. Click the Add collection button.
3. Enter a name and description for your collection.
4. Choose whether your collection is visible or hidden. Hidden collections are only visible to people who know the URL (for example, if you promote them in an advertisement).
5. Select the products that you want to add to the collection, or click the Add all products link to add all of your products at once.
6. Click ‘Save collection’.

Conclusion - Boost your navigation experience with Shopify Collections

Shopify Collections are an important part of building a user-friendly and interactive navigation experience on your e-commerce store. Add to that the superior organization of your products, thanks to collections. For businesses that want to thrive in this hypercompetitive e-commerce environment, using Shopify collections should be considered as a hygiene check when it comes to navigation and merchandising. 

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