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How To Create Collections in Shopify – Video Tutorial


Hey there, this is Kellis Landrum from True North Social.  We’re Shopify experts in the Los Angeles area.  We work with quite a few merchants, mostly in clothing, accessories, jewelry – that kind of thing.  But really, we work with merchants that have all sorts of different products, but we are Shopify experts we do most of our work on Shopify so we have created some video tutorials to help our clients as well as anybody else who is interested in running a Shopify store.  Learn a little bit more about how it works and how they can do things as well as some just general eCommerce concepts.  Today we are going to be talking about Shopify’s collections.

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Shopify has created some very powerful tools for Collections to help merchants better merchandise their product to be able to sell a little bit more effectively, to be able to organize different types of products, different ways that their customers might buy them.  Now the basics of collections if you are not super familiar with this is, collections are a way to organize products.  Very commonly you see stores with a menu that something like shop and there are collections of things like shoes, shirts, suits, t-shirts, depending on what kind of products you offer you will very likely want to categorize them into collections.

When you go to a collection page you will generally see the title of the collection somewhere on the page and you will see a series of products that are in that collection.  Shopify also offers the ability to sort by a few different things or browse by a few different things we can set the defaults for these and customers can pick them based on whatever they like.  But this is the basics for the front end what the customer will see when they go to one of your collections.  Now, how do we set this collection up? Well let’s take a look at that.  So, this is the admin of my Shopify store.  This is the dashboard which I am sure you have if you have a Shopify store and over here in the left-hand menu we have products and if you click on products you will see collections appear.  Now in order to add products to a collection you have to have products in the first place.  I’m going to assume you have some products set up.  If you are not sure how to set up products go to truenorthsocial.com/blog take a look at our blog and we created a video to, that shows you how to set up products.  You can watch that and learn about how to set up products if you’re not sure about how to do that. It takes a while so I am not going to go over that here but this is our products menu and over here on this side you have collections so we are going to click on that.

We are going to click on the create a collection button over here so we can create a new collection or let’s see what we have.  So, this is our page to set up a new collection. Every collection will need a title, you cannot publish a collection without a title. So, I am going to give this collection a title, I’m going to show you the basics right here of how to set up a manual collection – that is a collection where you manually add products to it and you manually sort them.  It is a very basic kind of collection and almost every merchant will want to have at least one of.  I’m going to call this one, my favourite things.  Right? I’m going to give it a description and I’m going to say “My favourite items on my store” you can be a little bit more descriptive when you create an actual collection. Now since I want to create this collection to be a manually selected collection I’m going to click this little radial button that says, ‘manually selected products.’ Right? And that is going to give me the ability to manually select my products.  Now here is a little bit of a tricky part.  How do I add them?  Well I have to save my collection first so I’m going to hit the save button and now – oh! low and behold – I see products here and here is a field to add some products so I am going to click in here with my mouse and now I see a collection of product or all the products that I have created within my Shopify store. Now I can just click on these to add one and there we go. I see there’s a belt let’s say I have a lot of products and I want to search a little bit, I’m going to say, “Oh I want”, I think I have a Nike in here, yes, I want to have Nike running shoes.  That sounds like a good one.  Let’s see what else do I want to …. oh, I want to add this cool T-Shirt.  Let’s see what else might I want to add, oh, let’s add a suit.  I like all these things, how about a Cold Brew it is a random collection but these are my favourite things so these are all things I really like.  That’s really great.

Okay so now I have a couple of products selected for my collection.  You see here is my search engine listing preview.  These are auto generated by Shopify it’s taking the title that I specified up here and making that the title of my page.  My url is also appended with the title of my page and my descript, my SEO meta description is taken from here, from my on page description.  Now, if you wanted to edit this, you can click edit SEO and you can edit any of these things if you like but you don’t have to.  You can just leave them alone even when you click edit SEO which I am going to do for now.  Up here on the right we have sales channels by default I think it will add it to all your sales channels, you can click manage if you want to remove some I’m going to say I just want this collection to be on my online store, I’m done.  If you want to add images to your collections you can upload it pretty easy, pretty simple, pretty straightforward stuff.  So, I am going to save that.  Now, where is my collection on the front end of my store.  Well I haven’t added it to my main navigation yet, so how do I see this collection.  Well there is this handy dandy little view button so I can click that and now it is showing me my collection. So, I can see True North Social up here, I can see my favourite things is the title of my page, this is my description, these are the products that are in my collection one after the other, right?  So, I can look at this on the front end and okay that’s great.  Now, I just say, oh wait, you know what?  I really want this suit to be first and maybe the T-Shirt.  Let’s go back and rearrange those.  Oh, how do I rearrange those things, there, can I, well.  Okay, so here’s the trick.

See sort currently this has sorted my items by best-selling.  So, I need to click on this and pick manual.  Now once I pick manual I can see there’s these little dots next to my products and these will allow me to just drag and drop to reorder my products.  Really easy.  Really fantastic user experience.  You know what I don’t think I want this coffee in here after all so I am just going to hit that x button and it says one product removed, so that’s great, So I’m going to go back over to my thing here and nothing’s changed.  Why is that?  Okay, well I need to make sure I save my collection. So, I’m going to hit save over here, right? And I go back over.  Oh! nothing’s changed still why is that?  Well it is because I haven’t re-loaded my page, I’m not going to see any changes to my collection until I reload the page, so I’m going to click the reload button and now I am seeing my changes on here, that’s great.  Alternately you can also just close that tab and you can hit the view button again and that will load a new tab which in turn reloads the page again, or loads the page in the first place I guess you could say.  So that is how to create a manual collection.

Now, that’s pretty handy but let’s take a look at automated collections, right?  So, I am going to create a new collection here. A lot of collections that you’ll want to create for Shopify are going to be automated collections, now let’s take a look at what that means.  Under conditions here, by default when I hit create, when I go to create new collections it’s set to automatically select products based on conditions.  Now this gives me some options to create a collection based on logic, right? Products must match all conditions or must match any condition, right? And then I can say create this collection if the collection meets these certain requirements or meets any of these requirements.  So, let’s say any right?  So, I could say product title, I could say product type, I could say product vendor, I could say product price.  Product tag, compare at price, weight, inventory stock and then I can say it is equal to, is not equal to, greater, less than, contains, ends with, right? So, there’s a lot of powerful features in here, so let’s talk about for a second, let’s say I wanted to create a product, I want to create a collection that is based on products that are over a certain, products that are under a certain price. So, let’s say I want to create a collection called under $20.  Right? That’s great value products under $20.  Great for gifts! Right? Pretty common one for the holidays.

So, now.  Let’s say for the sake of argument I had a thousand products, right? This would take me a really long time to manually figure out what products I have that are under $20, right? So, I am going to say I want to select products that are based on product price and they are less than $20 and one cent, right, because I want.  Actually, I’m sorry, under $20 so that means if my products are $19.99 they will be in this.  If they are $20 they will not because the price has to be less than $20, right?  So, I’m going to save that and let’s see what I get on the front end.  So now these are all my products that are under $20.  This one is 15.99, 5.99, this one is zero! I’m giving this one away.  A couple of my products are set to zero.  Different products you can see all of these are based on things that are under $20.  So, let’s go back and take another look at some of the things we can do.  Let’s say I wanted to add another condition, right? Let’s see what’s another condition I could add to this to these products.  Let’s say… I think I have some product types in there.  Product type is equal to shoes.  I have product type in it so this is going to give me all the, I would say, shoes under $20.  I don’t even know if I have any of these in my store.  But, I am going to close this and let’s see.  That is, let’s see, you’ve got the saved, so this is going to say the product type is equal to shoes. I could have just added a lot of things but equal shoes.  I think everything is set to shoes.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s say that …  You know what let’s forget a second thing here, let’s say, I want to sort these things.  Right now, these are automatically sorted.  I want to sort them manually.  I can create an automated collection that I can now sort manually. So, let’s say I want to bring Coffee down or T-Shirt up I can do that and save.  I can do these things manually.  Now I can go over here, I can refresh my page and I can see that things are sorted manually.  You kind of get an idea of some of the powerful things you can do here.  Let’s say later on I decide I don’t want to sort these things manually, I want to sort them by highest to lowest price.  Actually, you know what?  Nobody is going to want to buy the most expensive thing first, they are going to want to buy the lowest priced things first , so, let’s do that.  So, save this and let’s see what I have here.  Okay, you know what I want to get rid of these products that are zero dollars.  So, you know what we can do to get rid of them.  Let’s add another condition and say the product price is less than $20 but it is greater than $0.  Right, so everything that is zero should be next.  Now let’s take a look at that.  No, maybe we might have to go over one cents.  Now we’re still getting zeros here so make sure we saved everything, let’s try view.  Still getting stuck for zeros.  Oh, any condition. So, this is what is tripping me up.  Some of these products match one condition but not the other and we have any condition so let’s reset this to all right so now products have to meet both of these conditions.

So, I’m going to save this and go back over here and now we’ve got rid of that.  So, tricky little things.  These are logic based, right, so we have to keep in mind what our logic is when we are looking at these.  Sometimes if you can’t figure out this logic, you’ve been working with a little bit, maybe you just wanted to start over, start from scratch.  But these are the, this is the very basics of how to create a collection, how to add some products to it, how to create manual versus automated collection.  And, again my name is Kellis from Kellis Landrum from True North Central I hope this has helped you out today and feel free to give us a call if you’d like to talk to us about working one on one.  Thank you very much.


 

Check out all of our posts in the Ecommerce Website Design series:

E-commerce Website Design: Series Overview
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/ecommerce-website-series-overview/
E-commerce Headers and Footers – The most underrated piece of your Online Store
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/e-commerce-headers-footers-the-most-under-rated-piece-of-your-online-store/
Homepage Banner Best Practices for Shopify Online Stores
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/homepage-banner-best-practices-shopify-online-stores/
How to make a great homepage for your E-commerce Website
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/how-to-make-a-great-homepage-for-your-ecommerce-website/
What you need to know about your E-commerce Shopping Cart Page
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/what-you-need-to-know-about-your-e-commerce-shopping-cart-page/
How To Create New Products in Shopify – Video Tutorial
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/create-new-products-shopify-video-tutorial/
How To Create Collections in Shopify – Video Tutorial
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/create-collections-shopify-video-tutorial/
How To Create New Pages in Shopify – Video Tutorial
https://truenorthsocial.com/ecommerce-website-design/create-new-pages-shopify/

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