Overview:
This article outlines the key differences between Shopify collection types and best practices for using each type within your workflow inside Upright Lister.
Table of Contents
Getting Started
Shopify Collections are a tool used to group products on Shopify. Collections can be used as navigation on your Shopify storefront, depending on your store theme.
Shopify has two different types of collections, Automated and Manual collections, both of which can be used with Upright Lister in different ways.
Use the above links to go directly to the desired topic or continue to scroll down for more information.
When to use Manual Collections and Automated Collections
Manual and Automated collections can act very similarly on the storefront of your Shopify store, but deciding which to use for organizing your products depends on the workflow of your organization.
Use Manual Collections when...
You want your listing team to decide which collection the product should go to
You want to decide on an item-to-item basis which collection(s) should be used for a product
Use Automated Collections when...
You don't want your listing team to worry about selecting the proper collection for a product
You would like products automatically grouped on specific product attributes. This works great if products can be easily sorted into product categories/types
Some additional things to consider...
Manual collections require very little setup other than creating empty Manual collections. The decision of what collection a product should be stored in occurs at product creation time in Lister.
Automated collections will require additional planning as conditionals on specific attributes need to be set properly to ensure only the correct products are included in a specific collection.
Accessing Collections in Shopify
Collections can be found under the sidebar Products menu option.
From here, you can view your existing collections or create a new collection.
When creating a collection, you will have the option between two different collection types.
Manual Collections
Manual collections (also called custom collections) will be collections where, when creating an item in Lister, you would specify which manual collections the product should be included in. This flow will be completely managed in Lister on a per-item basis. Click here to learn more about Shopify Manual Collections.
The products can be added to a Manual collection once the collection is created on Shopify. After creating the collection, Lister will automatically pull in a list of all your manual collections when creating a Shopify Listing.
Collections in Shopify:
Selecting collections for a new product listing in Lister:
Multiple manual collections can be used at the same time:
Automated Collections
With automated collections, the setup of the collection will be exclusively in Shopify. You can specify products with specific names, product types, and even products with a certain price to be automatically grouped. There is a number of attributes that can be used for automatic grouping, which we will go over later.
Multiple conditions can be added to the same Automated Collection, and you can choose if All conditions or a Single condition needs to be met in order to include a product in the collection.
A great way to use Automated collections is to use them to filter Shopify products based on their Product Type. The Shopify Product Type is automatically set to the Lister Product category.
For example, using the Lister product category: Art > Photography.
When creating a Shopify listing, the Product Type will be set according to the Lister Product Category.
Then in Shopify, an automated collection can be created for this Product Type
Product attributes that can be queried against include...
Product Title
Product Type
Product Vendor
Product Price
Product Tag
Compare at Price
Weight
Inventory Stock
Variant Title
Depending on the Product attribute, you will be able to use a specific condition...
is equal to
is not equal to
is greater than
is less than
starts with
ends with
contains
does not contain
yes
no
Not all conditions can be applied to all Product attributes. For example, the Product Tag attribute can only use the "is equal to" condition.
Once the Automated collection is set up in Shopify, products listed to Shopify from Upright Lister containing attributes specified in an Automated collection will be automatically grouped!
If you choose to use Product Tags for your Automated collections, you can use Lister's Listing Strategies to change a listing's collection based on its current step within a strategy.
Consider this example: If a listing gets to Step 5 of a listing strategy, I want to ensure it has the "last chance" tag, which my Automated collection is set up to read from.
I can do so by setting the tag option in the Listing Strategy form like so:
Whenever a Shopify listing gets to this step in the strategy, it will be tagged as a "last chance" item for my Shopify store.
Note: The value of the Tags input in the Listing Strategy form does not add tags to the listing but rather replaces them. Make sure that you have all the tags you want for your listing set in the Listing Strategy form.
Additional Shopify Documentation
For additional details regarding Shopify collections, please take a look at the Shopify documentation regarding collections.
Using either Manual or Automated collections can improve efficiency and allow for better organization of a storefront for customers.
Please take a look at this Shopify youtube video regarding collections for some quick tips regarding collections on Shopify.
Related Guides
Have questions? Reach out to us at support@uprightlabs.com or via chat anytime between 9am-6pm ET, Monday to Friday