From Shopify Wiki

This page is where you can see all the products that populate your shop. You can add new items here, and organize the product list using the controls on the sidebar. If you want to see how much of each product you have in stock, the sidebar also has a link to your inventory overview

Adding New Products

After clicking the Add new product link, just fill in the appropriate fields with your product information and hit the Save product button.

Add Product Screen

• Required Fields: Title, Product Type, Product Vendor

To make it easier for customers to find products, organize your products into collections. To learn how to create collections, read here.

Here are some tips for entering product information:

• SKU (Stock keeping unit): An SKU is a unique identifier for each of your product entries and "variants" which you can use to better organize your inventory. You don't have to use SKU numbers, but they can be very helpful especially if your inventory gets to be large. There are a number of different ways you can write SKUs, but you should stick to the same format for each of your products.a
• Deny/allow out-of-stock purchases: This choice should depend on how much time it takes you to restock. If you are selling glossy prints of a painting that you just finished, for example, you could allow people to always order more because the prints don't take you long to make. On the other hand, you would probably want to restrict people from ordering any more rare packages of baseball cards from the 1950s if you've just sold the last one you have.
• Tag your item: Customers can find products with particular tags using your shop's search page, and they can use tags to filter any collection views that are linked to in your shop. You have complete control over how you want to tag each product: a pair of jeans could be tagged with "classic blue denim," or instead with "casual rugged pants," or you could use all of these. Remember: reuse tags between products as much as possible by using your list of existing tags. You probably don't want to end up with a "tshirts" tag and a "t-shirt" tag because your customers would have to successively visit a collection filtered with "tshirts" then view it again filtered with "t-shirt" in order to see all of your t-shirts in said collection. In fact, you may want to limit the number of tags in your shop to just a handful for each of your main collections so that your customers don't get overwhelmed by options. Take note also that tags are case-sensitive in Shopify. That means that 'Black' and 'black' are 2 different tags. More information on using tags with collections can be found here.
• Weight: This is used to calculate shipping costs, so it's good to be as accurate as possible.
• Compare at price: If you want to brag about how much better your prices are compared to your competition, you can use this field to tell your customers just how much those swindlers are charging for the same product. Alternatively, you could use your compare at price to represent your "regular" price when you want to put a product on sale. You will need to make sure that the "theme":LookAndFeelHelp you are using displays the compare at price in such a way that it expresses the intended meaning.
• Product Options Product options are a way to distinguish your product variations. By default, every product's variations are distinguished by a single option. But, in many cases, you may wish to distinguish your product by more than one option. Example: a T-Shirt has 2 product variants: Size and Colour.
• The units of measurement and form of currency used by the new product form are set automatically depending on the country selected during account creation, but the defaults can be changed in your General Settings area.

Getting Product Variants

Check off "This product's variants have multiple options that distinguish them."

Product Options on the New Product screen

Product Variations

Variations could represent different sizes of a piece of clothing, different strains of sunflower seed, or different sizes of computer monitor. Each variant has its own prices, weight, and inventory record, but they all share the same product page which lets the customer choose which one they want to buy. You can only add variants in the product management screen, after you have added the product.

You can always decide to create a new own product for every variation of this product, but this can result in a lot of time wasted for your customers as they browse your shop looking for exactly what they want. It's all up to you, but a good rule of thumb for many shops is to group products as variants when a single product description could fit for all of them.

If your variants have visual characteristics which distinguish them from one another, then you may want to add an image to your product for each variant so that your customers can see exactly what they're going to get. Please note that there is currently no easy way to associate the uploaded images with any particular image. For that you need to upload images with a name that can be hooked to the variant through either the SKU or title or other attribute. You can then use some Javascript to listen for "click" events on variant images, or <select> element changes, and show the image matching the variant.

Managing Product Variants

There are a number of time-saving tools that will help you manage your product's variants.

• Bulk select and actions When your product has a number of variants, a helpful select bar will be available, just above the table listing of your product variants. By default, the 'all' and 'none' links will be available, as well as the values of each option's values. Selecting any of the links will select all of the relevant variants. As well, you can manually bulk select variants using the checkboxes beside each variant. The bulk actions select box will appear on the top right side of the table which has a number of options available.
  • change price Sets a new price for all selected variants.
  • change quantity Sets a new inventory quantity for all selected variants.
  • delete Deletes all select variants
  • Duplicate variants in another ... Will duplicate selected variants and set given Option on all new variants to a new value. This option will only be enabled if all the selected variants have are all of the same option value for a particular option.

Bulk select and action for Product Variants

• Reordering/Reorganizing Variants Variants can be reordered easily by dragging the variant into the position you want within the table list, by dragging the 4-arrow icon on the far right of a particular variant. Variants can also be reorganized by clicking on the top right icon (seen in screen shot below), which will bring up a Reorganize Variant window. This allows you to reorder all the variants based on the order of the product's options.

Reordering/Reorganzing Variants and Options

Reorganize Variants window

• Reordering Product Options The order a product's options can be changed by hovering the mouse over the Inventory table headings, and clicking on the left/right arrows that appear. This will move the order of the selected option to the left or right. See the "Reordering/Reorganizing Variants and Options" screenshot above.

Editing your product information

After adding a new product to your shop or by clicking on the product's icon in the main product list, you are able to edit any aspect of the item. In addition to the things you can change when first adding the product, there are a couple of new options which aren't available on the add product such as reordering product images.

• Renaming Product Options The name of options can be changed in the product edit screen. Options names must be unique within a product (ie: you cannot have Size and Size).

• Deleting a Product Option While uncommon, it is possible to a product option (as long as it's not the last one). In order to enable a particular option (for example, Color), all your existing product variant's must have the same Color. That is, you will only be allowed to delete an option if all the values for that option are the same.

Image Management

You are able to drag and drop each of your product's images to put them in any order you like. The first image is labeled as "featured" and will be displayed more prominently in most themes.

There are important things to be aware of early in the process of setting up you shop:

• You can't edit your image filenames after they have been uploaded to your shop. There's no 'edit filename' function in your shop admin.

• Don't use the _thumb suffix in your image filenames ever. (Or _large, _medium, etc.) For each image you upload to Shopify, whether it is a product image or an image you upload in the Rich Text Editor, Shopify generates automatically a collection of images which are resized to different formats. For a full list of sizes, head over here. Shopify takes the original filename and appends _small to that filename to name the small image it creates, and does similarly for all other sizes. If you use _thumb (or _small, etc.) in your filename, you may end up seeing 1 image when you expect to see another.

• About image dimensions, read this: How do I make my product images the same size on collection pages? Use large images with 72dpi resolution. No need to go over 1024 by 1024 pixels, however.

• Search engines like it when you insert descriptive and relevant keywords in your images' filenames. Meaning: customers will find images of your products easily on Google Images if you go the extra mile of thinking about how you will name your image filenames.

Bulk Importing Products (CSV)

You can bulk import products by preparing and uploading a CSV file with your products.

From the Products tab, select Import Products.

Bulk Product Import page

You will be directed to the Product Import page as shown below, where you can download our template CSV file is available to assist you.

Bulk Product Import page

Preparing the CSV file

NOTE: All files should be encoded in UTF-8 and (if possible) use Unix-/Mac-style linefeeds. Read Help:UTF-8 for more info on how to save files as UTF-8.

A CSV file (Comma Separated Values) file is a plain text file with commas delimiting the fields. The first line of the CSV file is the header, and contains the name of the fields. A sample template CSV file is available to assist you, which you can download from the link in the Product Import section of the admin. We do not recommend sorting the CSV by columns as most spreadsheets will jumble the data and cause problems when attempting to re-upload the file.

For Shopify, we require the following fields to be present (as per the sample CSV file):

Handle,Title,Body (HTML),Vendor,Type,Tags,Option1 Name,Option1 Value,Option2 Name,Option2 Value,Option3 Name,Option3 Value,Variant SKU,Variant Grams,Variant Inventory Tracker,Variant Inventory Qty,Variant Inventory Policy,Variant Fulfillment Service,Variant Price,Variant Compare At Price,Variant Requires Shipping,Variant Taxable,Image Src

Handle 

Handle is a unique name for a given product. They are used in the URL to link to that product. (e.g. handle: snowboard will have the url /products/snowboard). In the CSV, every line starting with a unique handle is treated as a new product. Every line should have a handle, with variants and images using the same handle as the product they belong to.

Title 

Product title

Body (HTML)

Description of the product in HTML format.

Vendor 

Name of the vendor (min. 2 characters)

Type 

Product type

Tags 

Comma-separated list of tags used to tag the product. Most popular spreadsheet applications like Excel and Numbers will automatically add quotes around the tags for you. If you are using a plaintext editor you will need to manually add the quotes so they look like so "tag1, tag2,tag3". If you see tags show up on products with "tag1 tag2", this is a common sign your spreadsheet application has done this for you and you can remove the quotes that were added.

Option1 Name 

Name of the default option that is used to distinguish a product's variants. For products with only single option, should be left as "Title". If the row is either a product or variant, there MUST always be a value for Option1 Name.

Option1 Value 

value to distinguish a product variant. If the row is either a product or variant, there MUST always be a value for Option1 Value.

Option2 Name 

If a product has a second option used to distinguish a product's variants, enter the name of the option here. ie: "Size".

Option2 Value 

If a product has a second option, enter the value of the option for this variant here.

Option3 Name 

If a product has a third option used to distinguish a product's variants, enter the name of the option here.

Option3 Value 

If a product has a third option, enter the value of the option for this variant here.

Variant SKU 

The variants SKU (stock keeping unit). These are used to track inventory with inventory tracking services.

Variant Grams 

Weight of the product in grams. Will be converted to your shop's default unit of measurement. Don't put any unit of measurement in there.

Variant Inventory Tracker 

Who handles the tracking of inventory. Valid values ["shopify", "shipwire", "amazon_marketplace_web"] or blank

Variant Inventory Qty 

Quantity of this variant you have in inventory.

Variant Inventory Policy 

How to handle orders when inventory level for this variant has reached zero. Valid values are ["deny", "continue"]. "deny" will stop selling when inventory reaches 0, "continue" will allow sales to continue into negative inventory levels.

Variant Fulfillment Service 

Fulfillment service. Valid values are ["manual", "shipwire", "webgistix", "amazon_marketplace_web"]

Variant Price 

Price of the variant. Don't place any currency symbol there. Use, for example, 9.99, not $9.99.

Variant Compare at Price 

If you want to brag about how much better your prices are compared to your competition, you can use this field to tell your customers just how much those swindlers are charging for the same product. Alternatively, you could use your compare at price to represent your "regular" price when you want to put a product on sale. You will need to make sure that the "theme":LookAndFeelHelp you are using displays the compare at price in such a way that it expresses the intended meaning.

Variant Requires Shipping 

Require a shipping address. Valid values are ["TRUE", "FALSE"] or blank (defaults to "FALSE")

Variant Taxable

Apply taxes to this variant. Valid values are ["TRUE", "FALSE"] or blank (defaults to "FALSE")

Image Src 

Since images cannot be placed directly into a CSV file, we accept urls of images in the Image Src column. Shopify will download the images during the import (e.g.: my-server.com/images/product1.jpg). Images must be hosted online and can not be uploaded from your computer through the CSV import method. Take note that you won't be able to change your image filename after that image has been uploaded to your shop, please read this to understand how this may affect you down the road. Also, don't upload any image that has a _thumb (or _small, or _medium, etc.) suffix in its filename. Read more about best practices regarding your product images here: Image Management ← a must-read.

Example CSV files

CSV of 1 product with several variants, distinguished by a title.

 Handle,Title,Body (HTML),Vendor,Type,Tags,Option1 Name,Option1 Value,Option2 Name,Option2 Value,Option3 Name,Option3 Value,Variant SKU,Variant Grams,Variant Inventory Tracker,Variant Inventory Qty,Variant Inventory Policy,Variant Fulfillment Service,Variant Price,Variant Compare At Price,Variant Requires Shipping,Variant Taxable,Image Src
 tulip-print-12,Ready to Frame Tulip Print 12,"These prints ready to frame",Tajima Photography,matted_print,"flowers, ready-to-frame, tulips",Title,11x14 Ready-to-Frame Print,,,,,"",2000,"",1,deny,manual,40.00,60.00,,,static2.shopify.com/s/files/1/0017/4202/products/040509_181714.jpeg?1239908015
 tulip-print-12,,,,,,Title,16x20 Ready-to-Frame Print,,,,,"",3000,"",0,deny,manual,60.00,80.00,true,true,
 tulip-print-12,,,,,,Title,5x7 Ready-to-Frame Print,,,,,"",1000,"",0,deny,manual,60.00,80.00,true,true,

CSV of 1 product, two variants and several images

 Handle,Title,Body (HTML),Vendor,Type,Tags,Option1 Name,Option1 Value,Option2 Name,Option2 Value,Option3 Name,Option3 Value,Variant SKU,Variant Grams,Variant Inventory Tracker,Variant Inventory Qty,Variant Inventory Policy,Variant Fulfillment Service,Variant Price,Variant Compare At Price,Variant Requires Shipping,Variant Taxable,Image Src
 prints,Sample Print,"An image of the cottages at Lake O'Hara, just at sunset.",Tajima Photography,Poster,"lakeohara, landscape, sunset",Title,Landscape Artwork,,,,,"",2000,"",1,deny,manual,100.00,,,,static1.shopify.com/s/files/1/0017/4202/products/2006_lake_ohara_sunset_poster_1.jpeg?1239984371
 prints,,,,,,Title,Flower Artwork,,,,,"",2000,"",1,deny,manual,100.00,,,,static0.shopify.com/s/files/1/0017/4202/products/redyellow_tulips.jpg?1239984371
 prints,,,,,,Title,Clothing Artwork,,,,,"",2000,"",1,deny,manual,100.00,,,,static1.shopify.com/s/files/1/0017/4202/products/shopify_blue_shirt_1.png?1239984371
 prints,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,static3.shopify.com/s/files/1/0017/4202/products/tulip_print2.jpeg?1239984371
 prints,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,