Adding Products to Shopify: a Step-by-Step Tutorial

Adding products to Shopify seems straightforward, yet many end up with a messy store that kills conversions and takes up hours of admin time.

In this post, we’ll cover the basics and best practices of adding, organizing, and managing products on Shopify.

Set up your store properly

Adding products is a crucial step to get right, but not the very first or only one. There are a few more things to take care of that you could have missed.

They are: defining your audience, finding your niche, selecting the best products for the market, and choosing the right suppliers are all essential steps that can make your business succeed.

The complete Shopify store setup guide will guide you from a trial account to the first sale. It includes everything you need, from understanding Shopify fees to the legal requirements that confuse many new merchants. Save it for later as you’ll likely fall back on it from time to time until you get the hang of things.

With that in mind, let’s dive into the process of adding products to your Shopify store.

Step 1: Head to the products section

Once you’re logged in, go to “Products”, then click on “Add Products.” The display will be slightly different depending on whether it’s the first time you add products or not. Easy enough so far.

You can add one product at a time, or save time by importing many at once with a CSV file – indispensable when you have a large inventory or are migrating an existing store to Shopify.

The file should be structured to match Shopify’s required form fields. You can’t miss the crucial ones with the sample product CSV from Shopify, but filling them to create compelling product pages and structured inventory requires learning how to do it for one product first.

Step 2: Add the product details

The second step, and a crucial one to get right, is adding your product details. A sloppy product page is the fastest way to lose a sale. The goal is to keep the page clean, focused on the product’s benefits, and with the correct elements in place so customers know exactly what they’re buying and why.

Add a title

The first thing to add is the product title. Keep it brief, but take into account its potential to grab attention, and make it as descriptive as possible.

The best practice is to research how buyers search for products (keywords) and how competitors do it. For example, “Wireless Noise-Canceling Earbuds with Charging Case” clearly tells buyers what they get.

In this scenario, it works as it matches what buyers are looking for. In a scenario where you are selling earbuds from a premium brand, the brand name alone could be enough to attract buyers.

Write a compelling product description

The product description is your sales pitch. Use it to inform your potential buyers about the product’s features, benefits, and why it stands out. How you write it depends on the product, audience, and brand voice.

Three things to keep in mind for a product description that converts are:

• Include enough specs: All the elements the customer needs to know to purchase, such as dimensions, weight, availability, shipping information, etc.

• Benefit vs specs: Show, don’t tell! Focus on real-life usage and the problem the product solves, rather than only listing plain specs.

• Your unique selling point- USP: What makes your product better than competitors? It could be any point, as simple as faster shipping or premium materials.

Looks simple, but ranks high in the top 10 common Shopify mistakes merchants make.

Step 3: Upload images & media

76% of shoppers are compelled to click because of an excellent product image, according to a 2024 consumer research from Salsify. There is no second chance to make a good first impression, and neglecting images can lead to a skyrocketing bounce rate.

Uploading images is straightforward. Keep in mind to only choose high-quality images with consistent branding and background, and add multiple angles and real-life applications.

Step 4: Set the pricing

Before setting your price, consider doing some research: Analyse competitors, the cost per unit, your audience, and your long-term strategy. Once you have these, input the value in the form fields.

To show discounts, enter the original price in “Compare-at-price.”

“Cost per item” is not visible to customers; it’s for you only, and it will tell you how much gross profit you are making per unit.

Step 5: Set inventory and shipping settings

A few things to know:

• If you check Track quantity, Shopify will reduce stock when orders come in, across your locations. Shopify assigns fulfillment to the location with available inventory and the highest priority in your fulfillment settings.

• If you enable Continue selling when out of stock (only possible if “Track quantity” is on), customers can still order when inventory hits zero. This works like a backorder or preorder. Be aware: fulfilling these orders once you restock can lead to delays, and you’ll want to tell customers up front.

• If “Continue selling when out of stock” is off, once inventory for a product/variant reaches zero, customers will see it as sold out and cannot order it.

Fill out the SKU field (optional)

SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) are unique codes assigned to each product or variant in your store. It makes it easier to identify products in the backend and is essential for third-party apps, supplies, and marketplaces to recognize your products.

Without SKUs, you can still organize inventory when you have a few items and no integration, especially when you are starting.

While you can manage basic inventory without SKUs, using them becomes essential as your store grows or if you use integrations, marketplaces, or advanced inventory apps.

Shipping is very straightforward. Simply set the weight, and if your product ships internationally, the needed customs information. No shipping info is required for digital products (courses, memberships, tickets, subscriptions, songs, etc.)

Step 6: Add product variants

Adding variants can be tricky and time-consuming. Each one requires separate images, prices, and often other tailored information.

Experienced merchants use variants to drive sales. Many stores offer “Standard” vs “Premium” options, upsell and cross-sell discounted bundles, and display a limited stock message like “Only 2 left” for some variants to create urgency. This usually requires support from your theme or a third-party app.

Step 7: Refine the search engine preview

This is the title and meta description that may appear in Google search results. While search engines don’t always display this exactly, it plays a major role in how your product pages are indexed and understood by Google.

This is where SEO expertise comes into play, and it’s where most merchants either get it wrong or ‘just fine.’ Neither is acceptable.

We will address this later, as it ties in to your store’s overall SEO optimization strategy. First, check if your theme is among the top 15 Shopify themes for SEO.

Step 8: Organise Shopify products in collections

Your first product is now ready, but hold off on the publish button yet. Let’s take a step-by-step approach to organising and managing your Shopify store products in a logical and conversion-based way.

The next step is to group your products into collections. If you are running an apparel store, the typical collections are based on the type of apparel, gender, age, usage, etc. Depending on the size of your store, you can explore collections more deeply, as long as they have a logical flow and consider the search intent of your buyers.

Add products to collections

After heading to “Collections” on the dashboard and writing a compelling collection description, you have several options.

Manual collections: This option allows you to handpick products you want to add.

Smart collections: A smart collection will group products based on a set of rules. The rules are set based on the product’s title, price, vendor, inventory stock, and other variables, as shown in the image below.

A simple rule could be to categorize products with the tag ‘summer’ under the ‘summer collection’ or, as shown in the image below, put products in the ‘under $50 collections’ if their price is less than $50.

As the table below points out, you might not need to set up a smart collection.

Manual vs Smart Shopify Collections

Add a fitting collection Image

You can only pick one here, so choose an image that best represents the entire collection.

Add collections to navigation

The final step is to make the collection stand out. Adding it to the menu is the best way to achieve that.

On the left-hand menu, navigate to the online store. Here, select the menu and add the collection. You could even tweak the theme slightly and create a separate menu for a special event.

A good strategy is to create a collection based on a marketing hook. Name a collection “Best Sellers” or “Under 30$” to attract attention.

The final step is to set your product as active, and that’s it! Now your focus should be on getting visitors to the product page. Before wrapping up, I’ll briefly go through how to do just that and customise your product page further.

Extra step: Add metafields to your products

Metafields are custom fields you can add to your Shopify product page or collections to add extra information. Instead of cramming everything into the description field, Metafields are separate and stand out better for customers and Google alike.

Product Metafields: Custom fields used to add information to individual product pages.

Category Metafields: Customer field used to add information to collections.

Metafields are essential in many ways. Primarily to provide rich details to customers and push conversions, but they’re also a strong tool to improve rankings. Shopify has laid out many other reasons why brands use metafields that are worth considering.

Optimize Search engine preview for SEO basics

Your search engine preview is what customers will see on the search page results. Most importantly, it is what Google will pick up first. As with metafield, the preview can be edited at the product and collection level. Both complement each other, making your store more discoverable by customers.

Your search engine preview is what customers will see on the search page results. Most importantly, it is what Google will pick up first, and even what LLMs are looking to index your store.

As with metafield, previews are edited at the product and collection level. Both complement each other, making your store more discoverable by customers. Keep in mind the following when writing your search engine preview:

• Write for people first, not search engines: The cliche of not cramming up keywords still holds true.
• Avoid duplicate description: Each product and collection should have a unique description, even though primary keywords can and should be repeated.
• Keep it short; you want your USP (Unique Selling Point) to be noticeable and attract in the first few words.

It all becomes even more crucial considering how fast SEO is changing and the hassle that comes with keeping up with every new algorithm update and AI search popping up everywhere. Not only that, but your site speed, content, and backlinks are just as crucial as your SEO (Meta) description.

With some extra tweaks, you could also have your product show up in Google’s product carousel and those rich snippets in search engines. Slightly more advanced, but nothing you can’t handle if you follow our guide on adding structured data.

Here are 10 more ways to boost your store’s SEO and 15 tools you can use starting today

Your product is live. What next?

This is just the beginning. Perhaps this was not your first product, and you only wanted a refresh on how to organize your inventory better – still, that doesn’t change the fact that managing products is a continuous work in progress.

As your store grows, it becomes crucial to add the proper third-party integrations, which we haven’t even touched yet. These tools help save time by automating workflows, emails, image optimisation, SKUs, and more.

At Shero, we offer custom solutions for all your eCommerce needs, saving you the trial-and-error process that most merchants go through.

F.A.Qs on adding products to Shopify