So let's go back to the admin for your store. If you haven't signed in for a while, you may need to go back to the welcome email you received from Shopify when you created the store. This email contains a link for your store admin. Make a bookmark (or favorite) in your web browser, for the sign-in page for your admin, so that you can get back easily next time. You will also need the email address and password with which you created the store.

When you get into your store admin, click on Products in the navigation panel. The page informs you that you haven't added any products yet. There's a button to Add a product and a link to Import products by CSV. When you have some products added you'll be able to manage your products from this page. You'll also be able to export your products if needs be. We'll be looking in-depth at importing and exporting products later in this section.

In the products section in the store admin, you will be able to add, manage, export and import products.

Adding A New Product

Let's click on the Add a product button. The page will update with the details that you need to supply for the presentation of the product. You'll notice the Cancel and Save buttons at the top right of the page. These two buttons will remain there as you scroll down the page. But you will also find them at the bottom of the page should that be closer to hand.

Product name
The product name is clearly one of the most important details for a product. Your store's visitors will use it to find, recognise and distinguish this product from others. It will be one of the most prominent visual elements on the product's page on your store. On top of that, the search engines (like Google) will use it to distinguish your product from the hundreds of millions of other products on the web.

The product name should be descriptive, short, unique and optimized. Your visitors need to know what the product is based on its name. It's best to keep it short so it can be read and understood quickly. It should be unique as otherwise you'd probably end up confusing both yourself and your visitors. The name should be written both for your visitors and for the search engines. Use the words that are most commonly used to name your product. That way, the most visitors will recognise them and at the same time, the search engines will know that they are relevant to more people.

Depending on your theme design, the brand name may or may not need to be integrated into your product names. Some themes come with the brand name (or product vendor in Shopify terms) integrated into the product pages. For those that do not, it may be a good idea to integrate the brand name into the product name.

Product description
The product description is the text that describes the product. It should answer as many of the questions that your store's visitors will have, while of course, remaining succinct. Suppliers will often provide descriptions for their products. However it is well worth investing the time to write your own unique descriptions. This will set your store apart from others selling the same products. Plus it may enable you to communicate better about your brand.

Above the description box, there are buttons for formatting the text in the description. If you are not sure what any of the buttons are, place the mouse pointer on the button and the name of the button will appear, as you can see in the screenshot above.

Clicking on the first button Formatting will reveal a dropdown menu to format the text as normal paragraph text, as one of six levels of headings or as a blockquote. With the other buttons you can format the text as bold, italics, in an unordered or numbered list, remove or insert indents, align the text to the left or to the center, and change the text color. You can insert links to other web pages and you can insert a table, image or video. The last button on the left will remove existing formatting from text. This is particularly handy if you copy and paste text in with formatting you don't want.

If you're handy with HTML, you can fine tune the formatting by clicking the <> button on the far right. This will display the description text in HTML.

Play with your description and see how it works. In general though remember it's best to keep the formatting simple. The theme you choose for your store will be already designed to elegantly display your products.

Below the description, you will find the product type and vendor to finish off the product details section:

Product type: What type of product are you describing? Shopify offers some good examples: Bicycles or T-Shirts. You will use the product types later to browse the products in the admin. You may also use them to group products into collections.

Product vendor: Who is the creator or manufacturer of the product? Often this will be the brand name. For example, Nike or Vans. Scrolling down past type and vendor, we come to the inventory and variants for the product. Let's look at the details one by one:

Price: This is the price at which the product will be sold. It will be in the currency that is defined in the settings, which we will look at in more detail later.

Compare at price: This is the full price or the price of the product before it was marked down. Perhaps there are recommended retail prices in your industry or perhaps there is a price at which this product is regularly sold by competitors. If you want to include these then do so by completing the compare at price. How this is displayed in your store, will depend on your theme. Some themes will display a compare at price as slashed out, for example $89.00 as in the example above. Other themes will mark a product as on sale, if there is a difference between the selling and compare at price.

SKU (or Stock keeping unit): The SKU is a unique identifier for each product variant you have. So for example, if we have a t-shirt that is available in five sizes, each of these sizes will have its own SKU. You have the choice to use SKUs or not in Shopify. They can be very helpful if you have a complex or large inventory. We will look at product variants a little later in this chapter. If you have barcodes for your products, you can put them in this field. And if you have a barcode scanner, you should be able to scan the code direct into this field.

Weight: The weight will be used to calculate shipping cost if these are calculated based on the weight of the order. It should reflect the weight of the product when it is packed to be shipped. At the same time, if the customer orders more than one product, bear in mind that often you can save on packaging and shipping. The units used for weight (lbs or kgs) are defined in the general settings.

Charge taxes: This checkbox, selected by default, indicates that taxes should be charged on this product. If taxes should not be charged, deselect the checkbox. Depending on your tax settings, in Settings > Taxes, the tax will either be added or will already be included in the price.

Require a shipping address: This checkbox, also selected by default, indicates that a shipping address is required so that you can ship this product to customers. If you don't need a shipping address, deselect it, for example in the case that you are providing services or digital goods that don't need to be shipped. For some products you may want to control and measure your inventory (or stock). For example, perhaps you have only five copies of a particular book that you are selling. If the five copies are subsequently sold, then you may or may not want to sell more, depending on how long it takes to get more copies of the book from your supplier.

Inventory policy - don't track inventory: The first option in the inventory policy dropdown, selected by default is Don't track inventory. In this case, there will be no tracking of inventory for this product, which means there is no limit to how many times it can be bought from your store.

Inventory policy - Shopify tracks this products inventory: With this second option, Shopify will track the inventory level for the product. When you select this inventory policy, two new fields will be revealed. Fill in the quantity of this product in stock. Then next you need to decide whether or not you will select the checkbox Allow users to purchase this item, even if it is no longer in stock. Unselected, your store's visitors will not be able to purchase this product if the inventory level is zero. If it is selected they will be able to purchase regardless of the inventory level.

This product has multiple options: Some products will be available in a number of variations. I mentioned earlier the example of a t-shirt that is available in five sizes. An iPhone case available in three colors would be another example. Each of these examples has one option, size for the first and color for the second. In Shopify terms, there are five variants of the t-shirt and three variants of the iPhone case available. For some products, you may wish to have more than one option, size and color for example. For product with variants, you will need to select the checkbox This product has multiple options to reveal the controls for the options. For the moment, leave the checkbox unselected. We will come back and look at this later.

Product images: Next you can choose the images that you want to associate with the product. Click on the button marked browse or choose files (depending on which web browser you use) and using the dialog box, select which images you would like to upload from your computer. Shopify will upload the images when you save the product. After the product has been saved, we will then also be able to look at how images can be edited and managed.

Tags and Collections: Scrolling further down the page, we come to tags and collections, two different ways to categorize or group your products. Collections are the primary way to organize your products into groups. So for example if you store sells clothes then you might have collections for: pants, shorts, shirts and sweaters. Tags are another way to categorize your products and work slightly differently. In fact, how they work exactly is very dependent on your theme. Different themes will treat them differently. If we continue with our clothes store example, you could use tags to mark different products according to their color: black, white, red, green, etc. So then if your theme supports tags, you should be able to view the shirts collection on your store and then choose to see only those that have been tagged black, for example. This can be very useful to your store's visitors, particularly if you have big collections.

Looking back at the new product page, you will notice the "Tags" section where you can type in a list of tags. After typing a tag, insert a comma and you will notice the tag being visually converted into a tag. Note that tags are case sensitive so that "black" and "Black" are two different tags.

Next, underneath tags, you can choose which collections you want your product to belong to. Clicking on the Add to collections button will reveal a menu where you can choose from the existing collections. In our case, because we have only just opened up our Shopify account, there is only the "Frontpage" collection. Note you will only be able to add the product to collections that use manual selection of products, not the collections that use automatic selection of products based on conditions.

Search Engine Optimization:The next section is for optimizing the product's page in your store for the search engines. You can put in a custom page title, page description and web address for the product. This topic warrants an in-depth look so we will look at it a little later.

Controlling the product's visibility: At the bottom of the page you will find the options for the product's visibility: visible or hidden. By default, visible is selected so your new product will be automatically published and visible in your store. You may prefer to hide the product - perhaps you haven't completed all the product details yet or perhaps the product is out of stock. To control the visibility of the product in your store, simply select either "Visible" or "Hidden" in the visibility section. When you have filled in all the product information, click on the Save button. If you have selected images to upload, It may take a little while to save and upload the images.

The Newly Saved Product

When the product has been saved and the images uploaded, the page will be refreshed and will show the detail for the new product. In a highlighted section at the top of the page, there are links to view it in your store or add another product. This section only appears when you first create the product. In future, you will be able to view the product by clicking the link View in your store in the "Product details". Note also the buttons at the top right of the page to or Save the product.

Scrolling further down the page, you'll notice a few changes. The product Type and Vendor are now listed in dropdown menus. The "Inventory & variants" section shows the detail for the one variant we set up for this product. The product images have also been uploaded and you can see some controls to edit them. Lastly there is a button to Delete this product at the bottom left of the page.

Managing Your Product Inventory And Variants

If you take a look at the "Inventory & variants" section, you can see that the one variant we created for this product has the "Default Title", has no SKU defined for it, is priced at $99 and that there are 10 in stock (quantity). There is a link to edit the variant on the far right and a button to Add a variant under where "Inventory & variants" is written. Just above that button there is also a link to edit options for the product's variants.

Let's add a new variant to see how it works, we can always delete it after. Click on the Add a variant button and a pop-up will appear where you can complete the new variant's details. You will be familiar with these details as you saw them earlier when we first created the product. Each variant will need this information to be complete Fill in all the fields as you like, leaving the inventory policy set as "Don't track inventory" and click the Add variant button to finish.

The inventory section will now be updated with another line for the new variant. I called mine 16" x 20" and priced it at $89 as you can see in the screenshot above. It's a new size for my poster. The N/A shown for the quantity means that the quantity in stock is not available. Putting the mouse over the N/A will reveal that the "Variant doesn't track inventory". There is no limit to how many times this variant can be sold.

Sometimes you will want to change the name of a variant, the SKU, the price or the quantity. You can do this easily by clicking on whichever you want to change. This will change the field so it is directly editable. Update the field as required. I renamed the "Default Title" variant to 24" x 30", the main size for the poster. Pressing return or enter on your keyboard will save the changes you have made to the product. Alternatively you can just click somewhere else on the page and save the product later.

Alternatively you can change these four fields and also the compare at price, weight and inventory policy by clicking on the edit link to the right of the variant. The pop-up to edit the variant's details will be displayed (see the screenshot on the last page). I changed the inventory policy on the second variant so that Shopify tracks its inventory and I entered a quantity of 10 as you can see in the screenshot above.

Next select the checkbox to the left of one or more variants. You will notice that the layout of the inventory section changes. Clicking on the button Bulk actions will reveal a menu that you can use to quickly change variant prices and quantities. You can also delete and duplicate variants. Every product must have at least one variant though.

On the left under "Inventory & variants", you will see a link to reorder variants. Clicking this will display a pop-up where you can drag and drop the variants into the order you want them. In your store, the first variant in the list will appear as the default. So if you want another variant to be the main variant, you need to put it first in the order.

We referred earlier to an iPhone case available in three different colors. In other words, an iPhone case that varies by color (the option) with three specific colors available (the variants). In my example product, the "Oh the Trees Poster", there are now two different sizes available. Or to put it another way, it's a poster that varies by size (the option) with two specific sizes available (the variants). But I have the option set to "Title".

Under "Inventory & Variants", you will also find a link to edit options. Clicking this will display a pop-up with the settings for this product's options. If you click on the dropdown menu, you can choose an alternative option. As standard, size, color, title, material and style are available. But you can also create your own option by clicking on custom option. I changed the option to "Size" as the variants relate to sizes.