Now that you know how to create individual products, let's take a look at how you manage your products. Once your store is starting to take shape or is already up and running, you will often need to make updates to a product or a group of products. You might want to add more information to a product description. Perhaps a product needs to be hidden as it is no longer available or maybe you want to update the stock or price for a specific product. This is all done from the products section.

The products section

Click on Products in the navigation panel to open up the products section. If you have at least one product in place, you will now have a list of your products in front of you.

For each product, you can see: a thumbnail of the featured image; the product name; an overview of the inventory for the product; and the product type and vendor. If you want to edit a product, just click on the product name.

Finding products using the search facility

When your store starts to have more products, it becomes a little bit more effort to find the products you want to edit or manage. With this in mind, Shopify provides you with a simple way to search and filter your products.

Where is that pesky goat poster? Use the search box to find specific products.

To search for a product or products, simply start typing in the search box above the list of products. As soon as you pause, or hit enter or return on your keyboard, the products listed will be updated to reflect your search. To get back to the full list of products, just delete what you wrote in the search box. You can also search for products (and collections, pages, blog posts, orders and customers) using the search box in the upper navigation.

No matter where you are in the admin, you always have access to the search in the upper navigation.

Finding products using filters

So what if you want to get all products with a particular vendor or of a particular type? You might have noticed the Filter products button to the left of the search box. Filters are a very powerful way to filter down the full list of products to a specific group of products. Let's see how they work:

Click on the Filter products button to reveal the menu for choosing the filter.

In the dropdown menu "Show all products where", choose the filter you would like to apply: visibility, product type or product vendor. I chose product vendor in the screenshot above.

A second dropdown menu will appear. In this one you need to select the value you want for the filter you chose in the last step. Select a value and click on the Add filter button to apply the filter. I chose a vendor called "Radial Posters".

The list of products listed will now be updated to reflect the filter you have applied. So in my case, I now have a list of products for which the product vendor is "Radial Posters".

You can clearly see when a filter has been applied, because the filter will be visible under the search box. You can see in the screenshot above "Product vendor is Radial Posters". When you are finished with the filter, and want to get back to the full list of products, just click the x on the filter.

You can also apply more than one filter at a time if you like. For example if you were selling clothes, you might like to pull up a list of Vans' sneakers. In other words, show products by the vendor Vans that are product type sneakers. You can also filter by visibility: to see all products that are visible or hidden.

In the products section, click on the button Manage inventory, at the top-right to manage your products' inventory.

Managing inventory

You might have noticed the button Manage inventory at the top-right beside the button to add a product. Clicking Manage inventory will provide you with a way to easily manage and update the inventory for your products.

In the normal view of the orders section, each line represents a product and for each product you can see an inventory overview: "35 in stock for 4 variants" for example. When you switch into the manage inventory view, instead of each line being a product, each line shows a product variant. This view is designed for when you are doing an inventory of your stock. For each variant, you can see its inventory policy, how many are available and you can also adjust the inventory as necessary.

There are two ways to adjust the stock level for a variant: adding to the current stock level or setting the overall stock level. You can see the controls for each variant on the right-hand side. Let's look at the two different ways to adjust the stock.

If you have received new stock for a particular variant, you can add the quantity that you have received. To do this, click on the add button, type in the quantity received in the box and click Save. In the example above, I received 2 more of this product.

If you have done a stock count for the product variant and you realize that the stock figure in Shopify is not correct then you can correct the overall stock level. To do this, click on the set button, type in the overall quantity and click Save. In the example, I realized I only had 7 left instead of 8.

If you are managing stock in Shopify then you will most likely use this feature often. Keeping stock levels accurate in your warehouse can take quite a bit of effort but at least updating them in Shopify is quick.

In this view, you can also very clearly see the inventory policy for each variant. Remember the inventory policy specifies if the product variant should still be available for sale or not when there is no stock left.

To return to the products section, click on Products in either the navigation panel or to the left of the section heading "Manage Inventory".

Back in the products section, you will notice that each product has a checkbox on the left-hand side of the product image. If you select some products using their checkboxes, you will notice a button Bulk actions appear on the left just above the list of products. Click on the Bulk actions button to reveal a menu to publish, hide or delete the selected products. You can also choose to add the selected products to a collection of your choice.