Categories, Tags & Attributes
Product Categories, Tags, & Attributes
This video walks you through the process of entering the terms that will enable you to add products to your catalogue.
Categories
Categories are the means by which products are grouped in your store (the catalogue). If you already operate a bricks-and-mortar store you probably have a good idea of how to arrange merchandise but a virtual store is different. Products are not always visible and customers can jump from one item to another following no logical pattern.
That said, there are some basic caveats for defining categories:
- Don’t duplicate terms.
- Make labels short and clearly understood.
- Categories are intended to group products based on a consistent set of properties.
- Categories should not contain hundreds of items nor should they contain extremely few items. If a category is too large, customers will be forced to browse through many pages of items and may leave your store before they find what they want. If there are too many categories, it will take extra time for customers to locate items they think should be grouped together.
- Products can be assigned to more than one category.
Tags
Tags are usually single words that can be assigned to products to simply searching in your store. For example, an Orange, Highball shirt could have each of these tags assigned to it. However, if the customer enters the search term shirt, this and all other products would be selected. Similarly, using “orange” as a search term would display this shirt all other orange merchandise.
Attributes
Attributes let you define extra product data, such as size or colour. You can use these attributes in the shop sidebar using the “layered nav” widgets. For example, colour is an attribute as is size, sleeve length and waist size. When you define attributes you are specifying features that apply to a range of products. For clothing it would be such things as size, leg length, colour, etc. The attribute colour would also apply to other merchandise with allows customers this selection option.
Therefore, it is important to think out what attributes are required and to which products they apply before entering actual merchandise on your store. Once an attribute has been added, its name cannot be changed – you simply have to delete and add another. This will require you to update all associated products.
When you add a product to your catalogue, you choose the attributes that apply to it specifically. With in the attribute you determine the options available. For example, for Shoe Size, you would enter options such as 5,6,7,8 etc.
