Starting a new business is an exciting adventure. If you’ve chosen the e-commerce business route, then having a Shopify page is a great way to showcase your product offering. Now, perhaps you’ve gone through the first steps and have your Shopify up and running, but now it’s time to add your products to the page.
Whether you’re a big or small business, this e-commerce platform is user-friendly and generally quite intuitive to navigate. However, we know that having a helpful guide can make the process much smoother for you. With this step by step guide, you’ll have your product offering online and available for customers to look through and purchase in no time!
Why have a Shopify products page?
Your product page is an essential part of your business as it is the primary space where you can showcase your product offering to customers and hopefully generate sales.
So, your product page is where you include your products specifications, features, photos and any other information. This information is incredibly important as it will be used by your customers when they’re deciding whether to purchase your products or not.
How to add products on Shopify
So you’re ready to get your business up and running. Luckily, navigating the Shopify platform is pretty easy, and with this step-by-step guide, you’ll have your product page ready to go in no time.
Step 1: Log in to Shopify
First things first, you need to log into the back end of your Shopify account. With your login details at hand, this should be a simple process.
Once you’ve logged in, you should be on the Shopify admin page. From here, you’ll navigate to the Products page.
Step 2: Fill out the product details
Now you will need to fill out the details of your product, which will include information such as the products name, a description, product type and the vendor.
Product title
The product’s name is quite self-explanatory; however, some pointers will help elevate your product titles. When writing the title, you ideally want to provide them with a good amount of information without overwhelming them. So, it’s best to write shorter product titles that are consistent throughout your Shopify product pages.
Product description
The product description section is where you provide information to your customers that you think would be of value to them. This can include information such as benefits the product will provide them, product features as well as specifications.
You want to write an enticing description that will convince customers that they need to purchase your product. An important thing to remember is that you should write a description that maximises the potential for SEO rankings. This means ensuring you use targeted keywords, have the perfect length and always provide the features.
Product type
This section is pretty much self-explanatory. This is where you add the term that will classify your product into a certain category - such as “Tshirts and Vest” if you’re a clothing company.
Vendor
This is where you highlight whether you made the product yourself. If you’re purchasing products from a manufacturer and then selling them yourself, this is where you would indicate the supplier.
Step 3: Complete the extra information
Now that you’ve filled out the primary details about your product, it’s time to complete the additional information. This section, called “Inventory and Variants”, is where you add in details such as products price, shipping options, product weight and SKU.
Price
This is where you indicate the price customers will need to pay to purchase your specific product. You don’t need to add in a currency symbol here, as you can set your currency on your Shopify General Settings page.
Shipping options
For this section, all you need to do is decide whether you want to check the “Charge Taxes” and “Requires Shipping” boxes. If you’re selling physical products such as clothing or jewellery, you should check the “Requires Shipping” box; however, if you’re selling a service or downloadable product, you won’t need to do this.
Product Weight
You’ll definitely need to fill this field out if you will be shipping your product, as the weight will be needed to calculate shipping costs. It’s recommended that you add the weight in kilograms, and if you don’t know the weight, give an estimation - it’s usually best to be a little over than under in this case.
SKU
SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit and is used as a unique number to identify each product in your store. If you’re getting your products from a supplier or manufacturer, you’ll find the SKU on their website. Alternatively, you can do a Google search to find this information. If it’s not available, you can leave this field blank.
Other information
In the Inventory and Variants section, you’ll find numerous other fields that you can fill out. However, they’re not as important as the categories mentioned above.
- Compare a price - Here, you add the price of a competitor, usually to demonstrate how much more affordable your product is in comparison.
- Product barcode - This can be obtained by the manufacturer or supplier of the product.
- Inventory policy - This is where you track your inventory.
- Multiple options - Fill out this field if you offer your product in several sizes or colours.
- Fulfilment - You will fill this out if you have activated support from a fulfilment service to deliver your product.
Step 4: Upload images of your products
Now that all the nitty-gritty details have been filled out, it’s time to add the images of your product. Images are a great visual aid to show customers exactly what they’ll be getting.
You can add single or multiple images. This will likely depend on the product you’re selling; however, adding more pictures is a great way to show different angles of the product or the various colours it’s available in. Do remember to use high-quality pictures.
When adding images, it’s important to name them in the correct format - such as using dashes (-) or underscores (_) to separate the words. Additionally, the images should all be the same size.
The only frustrating thing about uploading these images to Shopify is that you cannot check the product images during this uploading process. You’ll first have to complete and save the page first.
Step 5: Add tags and collection details
Now that you’ve got the product images uploaded, you need to add tags and collection details.
The tags are used to categorise the product and can include characteristics such as the colour, material it’s made of, size, and if the products are used for a certain activity (like diving or camping). You can add as many tags as you desire; you must simply separate the tags with commas. Adding tags is a great way to make it simpler for customers to find your product.
The “add to collections” tab is used if you want to allocate your product to a specific group of items such as accessories.
Step 6: Optimise for SEO purposes
To ensure you get the most traffic to your Shopify product page, you’ll want to optimise for search engine listings. When creating your product page, Shopify will automatically use the information you’ve provided about the product and use it to create a meta description and page title.
However, if you want to generate an SEO friendly title and description, you’ll need to tweak this. To optimise the title and description, you should look to include targeted keywords that are highly valuable.
To edit the auto-generated meta description and title, you’ll have to navigate to the “product details” page, click on the “search engine listing preview”, and then select “Edit website SEO”. Now you can fill out the page title field with descriptive and valuable keywords and also write an enticing meta description (you can have up to 320 characters).
You will also have the option to alter the URL, which should ideally include keywords that are related to your product page.
You’re almost there! Remember to click “Save” so you don’t lose any of the information you’ve filled out so far.
Step 7: Publish the product page
Now that you’ve filled out and saved all the information about your product, it’s time to double-check and review everything before you go ahead and publish your Shopify product page.
To review the product page, click the “view your website” button. You will now see what your published product page will look like and check that you’re happy with everything. To make edits, simply click back on the individual product page.
Now you’re ready to publish - click “save product”, and you’re all set! You’ve added your first product page to your Shopify business.
