Q&A
Here's a reader question about curating collections as answered by Helen Hulskamp, Ecommerce Strategist on our team:
Q: How do I refine my products to have adequate selection, but also present a tight "collection" for display?
A: One of the nice things about Shopify collections is that you don’t need to organize your products in only one way since a product can belong to many collections. For example, you may want to have an “All” link in your main navigation that goes to a collection with every single product. Some shoppers (like me!) don’t want to proceed to checkout until they are sure they have seen everything.
Shopify has a built-in URL for this at /collections/all but it is a good idea to create an actual collection with the URL handle “all” so that you can add an SEO title, collection description and sort the products intentionally. You would not want this to be the only way that people can shop, as that would be overwhelming for shoppers who have an idea about what they want. You should also have menus organized by product type and possibly also other ways, such as by brand or by color, if those are important to how your customers browse. If you aren’t sure, ask your customers or conduct a card-sorting exercise!
If you have a small product catalog of products with variations, you can also implement something we call “faux variants.” An example of this tactic is when each color of a product is an actual separate listing on the collection page. However, once the visitor clicks on a product (a red t-shirt for example), they can seamlessly switch between colors as easily as they could with a true variant menu. Right now this functionality requires an app or custom development. It is on Shopify’s roadmap to add this functionality natively, but only for Shopify Plus stores.
Get in touch if you'd like our help with this, as part of one of our optimization projects.
Question: Answered
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