No matter what ecommerce platform you are using, adding products to an ecommerce website can be a nightmare. From resizing images to keeping track of variants there is no shortage of data to deal with. To make matters worse, dealing with the data doesn’t usually happen until after you’ve already spent hours researching product details on manufacturers websites.
When it comes to adding products to your site, any little bit of efficiency can be a big help. With Shopify, there are several features built right into the CMS that can help make life a lot easier on you.
- Adding Images from URL
This feature sounds like it should be more readily available in most ecommerce platforms, however it is not! With Shopify, you can upload a product image just by pasting in the url of the product image. Shopify will automatically pull the image off the page and upload it into your site. To do this, just right click on the image that you are trying to add to your site and click ‘open image in new tab’. Then copy and paste the url from the new tab and paste it into the product image portion in Shopify. Screenshots below! Over the course of adding several hundred products this tool can save you tons of time versus the traditional method of downloading images to your site and then re-uploading them into Shopify.
2. Managing Variants and Options
Managing the variations of your products can sometimes be a big problem. You may have a product that comes in red, blue and green as well as large, medium and small. This means the product matrix for this product includes 9 different options. How do you handle this? The answer lies in the product variants and options. Shopify allows you to create multiple versions of the same basic product through ‘Options’ and ‘Option Values’ which equate to product variants.
3. Product Detail SEO
Search engine visibility should be a central part of any ecommerce strategy. Many sites have features that allow you to manipulate the main title tags and description tags on your website. Making sure that your overall theme has default title and description tags is a good thing. However, one of the best sales channels for your ecommerce website will be purchases that are due to consumers finding specific products through a search engine. For instance, if you sell dog toys online, the search “Kong Dog Toy” will be an important search to rank for in your area. The best way to do that is to edit the specific title tag and description tag on the product detail pages of the Kong dog toys in your catalog. Shopify lets you do this! You can even work with the url to create a search engine friendly url structure for specific products.
