Let’s talk about product data, or more specifically, product taxonomy. This is a crucial aspect of selling products online, but one that you might not have thought much about before.
Product data comes in many forms, from the name, description, and images of the item, to classification data like product categories, options like size and color, different variants of a product, etc. A product taxonomy is the underlying model that ties all of this data together.
Your product data is an essential part of your Shopify store – it’s woven into every aspect of your shop, and it has a huge impact on shopper conversions and plays a major role in how customers find and interact with your products. It powers everything from site search and filters to how your products appear on platforms like Google and the Shop app, so managing it properly can make a big difference.
If you manage your product creation in Shopify, you may have noticed manual input required, such as entering size options (such as “small” and “large”) or color values (such as “red” and “blue”). While this process is time-consuming and prone to human error, it’s also an essential part of your setup. And while Shopify has historically provided default options for every product, such as size and color, it’s difficult to capture the diverse and unique attributes of millions of products sold online, and until now, this has required manual configuration.
At Shopify, we know the importance of having accurate and comprehensive data related to each of your products, and over the past few years, we’ve invested heavily in updating our product model. With that in mind, I am pleased to introduce Shopify’s standard product classifications and associated product attribute conceptsis now available by default on all Shopify stores. Our standard product taxonomy improves and speeds up the way you create and categorize products, makes cross-channel selling easier, and most importantly, improves product discoverability.
What are Shopify’s standard product classifications?
Shopify’s standard product taxonomy is a massive library of product data across 26+ industry verticals, mapping 10,000+ product categories and 1,000+ relevant product attributes. Complete and expanded classification.
Simply put, every product is mapped to a specific product category within a taxonomy. For example, say you sell chairs. These chairs fall into a specific hierarchy under the taxonomy: Furniture -> Chairs. -> Kitchen & dining room chairs).
Shopify’s standard product taxonomy is a public repository that allows us to gather important input from our merchant and partner community to continually improve our standard product categories and associated attributes. We also continually monitor how merchants use and customize the attributes in their stores, and incorporate some of these important trends and changes into our taxonomy.
These improvements are always backward compatible, meaning updates to classification models don’t disrupt the seller’s experience and sellers can benefit from new product attributes as soon as they are added.
Create products using Shopify’s standard product taxonomy
When you create a new product in Shopify, it will automatically leverage the new taxonomy by default. Let’s look at an example to see how this works.
After clicking “Add Product” on the Products page in your Shopify admin, enter a name, description, and add an image that you want to highlight on your product detail page. Our AI will then work with your taxonomy to classify and store the most important and relevant data about your product.
With the help of Shopify MagicGoing forward, our algorithm will be able to use your product name, description, and image to suggest product categories, which you’ll see in the category card just below the product image.
You can use the automatically selected category or narrow the category (and you should be as specific as possible to ensure you get the most accurate related product attributes). Shopify’s standard product taxonomy shows a list of associated products by default. Product Attributes These are attributes attached to a product’s category, as listed on the Category Metafields card (category metafields are how you reference product attributes in your Shopify admin).
Product Attributes This is an entirely new concept being introduced with Shopify’s standard product taxonomy: product attributes are implemented as category-specific product metafields in Shopify, accessible from the same surface as all your other products. Product Metafields.
Although the concept of product categories existed before the new classification system was introduced, A key upgrade in our model is the introduction of these category-specific product attributes and predefined values. Each category triggers a set of associated attributes, in particular Each product is not just categorized but is provided with a wealth of details to perfectly match what the customer is looking for.
In the above example, Shopify Magic has detected some predefined attribute values like color, seating type, chair features, etc. based on the product description and uploaded image.
If you prefer, you can also create your own custom color names. All these attribute values are saved so you can reuse them when creating or updating other products and edit them in one place, saving you time and minimizing manual data entry.
Product attributes and attribute values can also be used to power your product options – standardizing the way you manage your variants across all your products. This not only creates consistency across your product store experience, but also gives you the flexibility to choose which attributes per product will be different for each variant and which will be consistent. Let’s look at an example.
A bar stool might be sold in one white finish but come in multiple height sizes, whereas chairs in your store might be sold in a variety of colors but come in one size and material configuration. Product attributes allow you to determine where this information is most relevant for each product.
New Feature: Native Swatches Support
Now that you’ve set up your products using Shopify’s standard product taxonomy, let’s take a look at your buyer-facing product detail page. One of the exciting updates released alongside taxonomies is Shopify’s native swatch support. Once you set up your color attributes in Shopify, if you’re using version 14 or higher of a first-party Shopify theme (such as Dawn), you’ll find that swatches will automatically render on your storefront with no additional work for you.
If you’re using a custom theme, you can still take advantage of Shopify’s native swatch support. Learn more here. here.
Benefits of Shopify’s standard product taxonomy
Streamlined product creation and classification
Shopify’s standard product taxonomy now comes with AI-powered recommendations, making product creation and management faster, more efficient, and less error-prone.
At each step of the product creation process, Shopify displays product data suggestions derived from both our taxonomy and Shopify Magic, such as product categories, category-specific product attributes, or relevant attribute values. This significantly speeds up the product creation process, eliminates manual data entry, and standardizes the data you store across your product catalog. Creating product variants has also been simplified, as you can quickly create options and variants directly from product attributes.
You can also rest assured that your products are categorized according to a world-class classification model that provides the most relevant attributes for every product. What’s more, this model is continually updated as the industry evolves, so your products are always supported with the latest product information.
Increased product discoverability
Shopify’s standard product classification, especially product attributes, have a huge impact on increasing your product’s visibility.
Pre-packaged product attributes help buyers immediately understand the type of information they’re looking for when researching your product, creating a consistent shopping experience and increasing buyer trust over time.
Additionally, Shopify’s standard product taxonomy will enable shoppers to experience more accurate and relevant in-store search results than ever before, powering the future of Shopify’s store search.
Coming soon, product categories and their attributes will seamlessly integrate with the Shopify Search & Discovery app, allowing merchants to create storefront filters for shoppers using attributes like material and size, and categories like TVs or candles.
Product categories and their attributes will facilitate automated product creation. collectionThis lets you create product collections faster than ever before, based on attributes like color or age, or categories like snowboards or tableware.
Cross-channel selling made easy
Do you already sell or are considering selling products through sales channels other than Shopify? A big benefit of Shopify’s standard product classification is that it makes it easy to sell on additional channels.
Like Shopify, sites like Google and Instagram each have their own product taxonomy. The new standardized taxonomy will allow marketplaces and search engines to more clearly understand and recognize product data from Shopify, streamlining the syncing of this data and allowing for smoother integrations.
Additionally, closer alignment of our classification data with other site requirements reduces data entry and duplication of effort when publishing across channels, resulting in more seamless data synchronization that improves product performance across these channels.
We’re currently working with Google to improve your cross-channel selling experience with Shopify’s standard product taxonomy, and are actively working to expand seamless integrations between other selling platforms like Shop, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Stay tuned for these improvements that will further simplify how you manage your multi-channel selling.
How to get started with Shopify’s standard product taxonomy
Going forward, all Shopify merchant stores will be enabled with Shopify’s standard product taxonomy, meaning that all products you create will work with our taxonomy and use product attributes.
For products already created in Shopify, you’ll need to set up categories and attributes to get all the benefits of Shopify’s standard product taxonomy. Learn more about updating existing products here. here.
