I have been maintaining a web shop on my own for the past 6 years and I’m trying to move to Shopify. My store currently has over 500 items, and I am really struggling to understand how to get all those items into Shopify. It does not make intuitive sense to me, likely because of how I have been doing things over the past 6 years.
I’m not understanding how “products” and “collections” work. On my current shop each individual item is a “product” even if it is under a certain type of category. For example, let’s say I have a general category of “Lens focus masks.” Under that category are 50 items, individual masks that fit different lenses. The category has a few images, but each individual item does not. In my current store, each individual item has its own button that adds it to a cart.
How should I organize this in Shopify? Do I make a “Product” (Lens Focus Masks) and then add a variant in that product for each of the 50 individual items?
It seems to me like this is how “Collections” should work, but I can’t figure out how to really do anything with collections in such a way that makes sense to me.
It totally deppends if your products are mainly the same, then yes, you can create different variants in shopify and have them under a single product, and not necessarily all variants need to have images, could you share your current store and maybe i would understand it a bit better and could give you some more in depth advice.
Within this product, there are variants. Size and color are variants. All variants have their own unique ID but viewed as options on a single product page.
So, a red fish shirt in size small is a variant. It has a unique ID.
Product Example #2:
Product: Sony Bluetooth Speaker. All are the same color, size, and shape.
This product has no variants but it has a unique ID.
So a product can be a single item with no variants, but also an item that has variants.
Collection: a collection is a specific group of items belonging to a certain category. For instance men’s shirts is a collection. It can also be a sub-colllection of Clothing. But more than that, collections and sub-collections are created by you to house products. So, in a sense, collection and category can be the same thing. You must create a collection, and add products to the collection.
Lens Focus Mask: you can create 50 individual products, or you can create 1 product with 50 variants. That is your choice how you want the products to be structured.
This is how it looks like to set up a variant, and in there you can set up for each variant a different price, so let’s say i have seen on your current site that you have a lot of ‘TriBahtinov‘ telescopes, you can have all of them under a single product if you can differentiate them by 3 options, let’s say the lens size and 2 more options, and you can have on each of it a different size, if they have more than 3 options which differentiate them, you need to group the similar ones together to fit in these conditions, and one product can have 2048 variants in total, let me know if this makes sense.
Yes, thank you. I think I understand how variants work. In the case of the product “TriBahtinov Masks” I really only need one variant for each different mask. I have other products that will need at least three variants (item, color, add-on). So I think I’m getting this part.
Thanks for your input, I will play around with it again.
You’re on the right track. In Shopify, each “Product” can have multiple “variants” — so for your example, you’d create one product called Lens Focus Masks, and then add each specific lens type as a variant (with its own SKU, price, and inventory). Variants are best when the items are similar but differ by a specific option, like size or model.
Collections are just groups that organize products — for example, you can make a Lens Accessories collection that includes all your mask products.
So:
Create one product → Lens Focus Masks.
Add each lens-specific mask as a variant.
Use collections only to group similar products for easier browsing.
This setup will make your store cleaner and much easier to manage.
