Shopify is rolling out some major updates to its product model, the biggest in over a decade. These changes focus on making it easier for brands to create, classify, and manage their products, ultimately leading to a better customer experience and more sales.
A Better Way to Manage Products
Shopify understands that every product is unique. Think about shirts that come in different sizes and colors, or jewelry made from various materials and aimed at different age groups. To handle this, they’ve updated product categories to be more detailed. Plus, they’re introducing product attributes. These are like pre-made labels that connect to specific categories.
Product attributes help make sure your products are shown with the right details. This makes them easier for people to find on your website, on marketplaces, and even in search engine results.
Key Takeaways
- Updated Product Categories: More detailed to better classify unique products.
- Product Attributes: Pre-packaged Metafields that map to categories, improving discoverability.
- Automatic Attribute Suggestions: Shopify suggests attributes based on uploaded product media.
- Reusable Attributes: Attributes like color can be saved and reused across different products for consistency.
- Easier Variant Creation: Attributes simplify the process of creating product variations.
- Increased Variant Limit: The limit for product variants is jumping from 100 to 2,000.
- Developer APIs: New APIs are available for developers to update their apps to support the 2,000 variant limit.
- Combined Listings App: Shopify Plus merchants can showcase products in multiple colors with unique media and URLs from a single listing.
Showcasing Products with Attributes
With the latest version of the Dawn theme, you can use these product attributes to show color swatches. Let’s say you’re adding a new sweater to your store that comes in two colors.
Once you put the sweater in the "Shirts and Tops" category, Shopify automatically adds relevant attributes like color, material, and size. When you upload images of the sweater in blue and orange, Shopify suggests these colors. You can even rename them to match your brand, like "Frost Blue" and "Marigold Orange."
These custom colors can then be used on other products, keeping your brand’s look consistent.
Simplifying Product Variants
Using these attributes makes creating product variations much simpler. You can select a color attribute for an option, and the colors you defined (like Frost Blue and Marigold Orange) become the option values. You can do the same for size, setting values like small, medium, large, and extra-large.
The updated variant card makes it easier to manage these variations. They are grouped by options, and you can add media in bulk.
More Variants, More Options
This is a big deal: Shopify is increasing the number of product variants you can have from 100 to 2,000 per product. This change affects many apps and integrations. Shopify is providing new APIs for developers to update their solutions. Once these updates are done, all merchants will be able to use up to 2,000 variants.
Combined Listings for Shopify Plus
For Shopify Plus merchants who want more control over how they present products, there’s the new Combined Listings app. This app lets you show a product in all its different colors. Each color can have its own set of images and a unique web address, all managed from one product listing. This helps shoppers see exactly what they’re interested in, giving them the confidence to buy.
What This Means for Your Business
These updates to Shopify’s product model are designed to improve the entire product experience for your customers. By making product classification better, simplifying cross-channel selling, and allowing you to show more of your products, it’s now easier for buyers to find what they need. This should ultimately help drive more sales for your business. You can find more details on these updates on the Shopify Editions page.