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Shopify Collections: What are Shopify Collections & how to use Collections

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Shopify collections: One of the most important elements of creating a successful Shopify website is to ensure your products are arranged logically, in a way that makes it easy for your customers to browse through your catalog and find what they’re looking for. Setting up collections of products takes just a few minutes, but can bring big benefits to your online store. Read on to learn all you need to get started with Shopify collections.

What are Shopify Collections?

Shopify collections are groupings of products you can set up, to make it easier for your customers to browse all products within a certain category. For example, a fashion merchant might set up a collection of men’s shirts. A home décor Shopify store could set up a collection of lamps. 

You can also set up seasonal collections, like summer essentials, or collections of products that are all on sale. You can show your customers a list of all your collections, so they can easily find the selection of products they’re interested in and start browsing.

Another option is to set up an all products collection on Shopify. When you create a Shopify all products collection, every product in your catalog is included in the collection, allowing your customers to browse your entire inventory if this is something they want (and you want to allow). Listing all products in a collection like this is a good idea if you have a relatively small product catalog.

Why Should you use Shopify Collections?

To understand the importance of Shopify collections, try to think of your online store as a real brick-and-mortar shopping experience. When a customer walks into a regular store, products are rarely scattered throughout the store, arranged haphazardly. Instead, it’s easy to find the section of the store with women’s clothing, or office furniture, or (everyone’s favorite) the sale rack.

A Shopify collection list helps you organize your online store the same way, saving your customers time and making it easy for you to point them in the right direction of whatever they need. Also, you can optimize your collections for SEO for better search visibility. 

What’s the Difference Between Shopify Collections and a Product Catalog?

When using Shopify collections, it’s important to distinguish between your collections and your product catalog. On Shopify, all stores have a page that lists all of the visible products in that store. This is the store’s product catalog, and usually has the file path /collections/all. While your product catalog contains all the products in your store, your collections contain only certain products in your store, chosen by you and grouped together in ways that make sense for your specific use case.

Who Should use Shopify Collections?

While every merchant can benefit from Shopify collections, it is most important to use collections properly when you have a large product catalog. For example, a beauty merchant might have thousands of products in their store – eyeshadows available in various tints, a hundred different shades of lipstick, and a powder foundation for every skin tone imaginable.

Unless these thousands of products are arranged in easy-to-navigate collections, it can be difficult for your customers to find what they’re looking for. They may even become frustrated, give up, and turn to one of your competitors instead. Shopify collections pages help every Shopify merchant not only organize their products, but also to dictate the browsing experience and control how each customer is exposed to their store.

On Shopify, it’s easy to add products to a collection and it’s a great way to organize your product catalog in a way that makes sense for both you and your customers. Once you’ve set up your collections, you can think about how to add collections to your home page in order to feature them, and which specific products you want to showcase or promote. 

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What are Shopify Collection Types?

There are two main types of collections on Shopify: 

Manual collections are made up of products that you add to the collection yourself. This gives you a lot more control over the collection, but it requires more manual work on your part, in terms of adding or removing products. Manual collections are a great option for one-off collections like flash sales.

Automated collections are different in that they rely on selection criteria (or “conditions”), then add products based on these criteria. You can control which criteria the products must meet to be added to the collection, but the products themselves are added automatically. 

What are Shopify Sub-collections?

Sub-collections allow you to further break down your collections into more specific, smaller collections of products. Sub-collections can be nested under your main collections. 

For example, you might have a collection of “sale” products on your site. If you have a lot of products on sale in your store, your sale collection may become difficult for customers to navigate. Using sub-collections like “recently added” or “last chance deals” can help your customers focus on a specific selection of products and may increase conversions. 

5 Best Practices when Using Shopify Collections

Before setting up your collections, it’s important to think carefully about how you want to group your products together. Taking the time to create your collections properly the first time can help to increase revenue and save you time and energy later down the road. Here are a few key features to keep in mind when it comes to designing your Shopify collection list.

#1: Don’t forget your product reviews

As an e-commerce merchant, you already know how important online reviews are to your success. With almost 90% of shoppers citing online reviews as being just as trustworthy as personal recommendations, it’s essential to showcase reviews for products in your store.

Source: kkwfragrance.com

When displaying Shopify collections pages, make sure reviews for each product are clearly visible on the page. This engages your customer before they have even reached a specific product page and may also help them to easily find exactly what they’re looking for.

#2: Add eye-catching media

It’s important to think about how you’re going to entice your customers to browse your collections. One effective option is to link to collections from your homepage. To draw your customers into a collection, make sure you use a beautiful, eye-catching Shopify collection image that effectively represents the collection itself.

shopify collections
Source: tentree.com

Take a leaf out of Tentree’s book and use a Shopify collection image to let your customers know exactly what to expect from a given collection.

#3: Make your collections easy to find (Shopify collections)

Just like a brick-and-mortar store, some customers might come to your e-commerce store simply to browse and explore your catalog, but others are on a mission to find a specific product. As you are unable to physically point your customers to the corner of your store they’re looking for, it’s important to set up your Shopify collections to do this for you.

shopify collections
Source: gymshark.com

Gymshark has made their large product catalog easy to navigate with drop-down menus, subheadings, and helpful product collections. Some collections, like “hoodies & jackets” help customers find specific products, while others, such as “must haves” encourage customers to spend time browsing a selection of products.

#4: Take advantage of the seasons

While it is important to spend time setting up your collections properly, it’s also essential to remember to modify, remove, and update your collections as necessary. Keep your store fresh by adding new collections when the time is right. For fashion merchants, it makes sense to update your collections as the seasons change.

Source: us.sirthelabel.com

A great example is fashion-forward SIR., who have “summer escape” and “a summer evening” collections displaying seasonal offerings.

#5: Embrace filters and product sorting

Even when your products are organized into collections, you may have so many products in a collection that it’s difficult for your customers to browse the whole thing. 

For instance, a “sale” collection is a great addition to your store, as your customers can browse all the reduced-price items in one easy location, and also see the compare at price for each product if you are displaying it. However, if you have 500 sale items, it’s unlikely anybody will want to scroll through the whole thing.

shopify collections
Source: nclabeauty.com

One of the best ways to get around this is with filters or sort functions. A Shopify collection filter allows you to display only certain products within a collection. For example, rather than displaying all furniture on sale, you could just display your chairs on sale. Sorting items allows customers to browse your collection in a given order, such as from cheapest to most expensive, or from newest to oldest listing.

Add Combo Products to your Shopify Collections

With the PickyStory app, you can use combo products to aggregate products in your store and sell them as one single product. When you create a combo product, the app creates a new product in your Shopify catalog that acts as a container for the individual items you included in the combo. This combo product can be tagged and added to a collection in the same way that you would add regular products to a collection.

Source: lushdecor.com

This gives you the ability to display your combo products in a Shopify collection. It makes them easier for your customers to find, and helps to promote upselling by encouraging your customers to spend more and buy these pre-defined packs of grouped products.

shopify collections
Source: dipalready.com

Create a Bundle Builder Based on your Shopify Collections

While combo products make it easy to sell packs of products you have already aggregated, what if you want to let your customers choose their own products? Luckily, PickyStory has options for that too. With PickyStory’s bundle builders, you can display entire Shopify collections for your customers, and offer discounts when customers purchase multiple products.

Source: butcherbox.co.nz

With bundle builders, you can display a collection and offer your customers a percentage-based discount or a fixed amount discount when they purchase a certain number of items (determined by you). Or, if you would prefer, you can offer your bundle builder for a target price. You can display your bundle builder on a dedicated page in your Shopify store, which you can link to from your navigation menu.

Use Shopify Collections and PickyStory to Create Irresistible Deals

Shopify collections are an important tool when it comes to organizing your product catalog and creating a user-friendly browsing experience. Use PickyStory deals like combos and bundle builders to help generate more revenue from your combos and increase AOV from every store visit.

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  • Topics: Shopify How-To

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