Catalog
Your catalog is what customers browse and buy. It has four pieces: products, variants, collections and categories.
Products and variants
A product is the thing you sell — "Merino Crew". A variant is a specific one you can put in a cart — "Merino Crew, Medium, Navy". Every product has at least one variant, even if it never had a choice to make: a product with no options gets a single variant called Default Title.
A variant carries the things that differ between choices:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Price | Whole cents. Required. |
| Compare-at price | Optional. Shown struck through when higher than the price. |
| SKU | Your own code. Unique within a shop. |
| Barcode | Scanned at the counter. Unique within a shop. |
| Weight | Used by weight-based shipping rates. |
| Cost | What you paid. Used for margin reporting; never shown to customers. |
Options
Options are the choices a customer makes: Size, then Colour. Order matters — it is the order the choices appear on the product page, and the order variant names are built in ("Medium / Navy", not "Navy / Medium").
A product may have up to four options, and up to 250 variants. Every combination you want to sell needs a variant; combinations you do not create simply are not offered.
If you need more than 250 variants, the product is really two products. Split it — a single product carrying every size, colour and material at once is slow to browse and slower to pick.
Changing an option's values after variants exist does not silently delete the variants that used them. You are told what would be affected first.
Status
| Status | On the storefront | In search |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | No | No |
| Active | Yes | Yes |
| Unlisted | Reachable by direct link | No |
| Archived | No | No |
Draft is the default. A product does not appear anywhere until you make it active, which is why the go-live checklist asks for at least one.
Handles
Every product has a handle — the part of its URL. Handles are unique within a shop and derived from the title on first save. Changing a title later does not change the handle, because links people have already shared would stop working.
Collections and categories
Collections are how you group things for customers to browse: "New In", "Sale", "Winter". A collection is either:
- Manual — you pick the products, and you control the order.
- Automatic — you set conditions ("vendor is Icebreaker", "price under $50") and membership follows the catalog.
Categories are a single tree for your own organisation. A product sits in one category. Collections can overlap freely; categories do not.
Media
Images belong to the product, and a variant can point at one of them as its own image. Uploading the same photo once per variant is not required — pick which of the product's images represents each variant instead.
The first image is the one used in listings and in social previews.
Where to find it
Manage → Products, Collections and Categories, each with its own screen in the sidebar.