Tag formats

If you have only a few products, then you might not need a product tag strategy. However, if you have a large number of products and you want to use tags effectively with your products and collections, then you need to have a common tag format that you can use consistently.

You can apply up to 250 tags to each product.

Product tag guidelines

The following guidelines can help make your tags work best for you and your business:

  • Characters - Use only ordinary letters, numbers, and the hyphen (-) in your tags. Avoid accented characters and other symbols.

    Although you can create tags that use some special characters, they might not work as you expect in searches or as conditions in automated collections. Special characters in tags are either ignored or are treated as being the same.

    Example: Suppose you have a condition for an automated collection of Product tag is equal to red-new. All products that have the following tags are also included in the collection: red_new, red+new, red&new.

  • Length - For ease of use, keep your tags short. For example, depending on the number and variety of products that you sell, you might be able to use tags that are all no more than 16 characters.

  • Simple and understandable - Name your tags in a way that makes sense to you and your staff so that each tag has a clear purpose and is easy to remember.

  • Clear to customers - In some online store themes, your product tags are shown to your customers, such as in drop-down filter menus. Because the tags are visible, you need to make sure that they make sense to customers.

    For example, suppose that you want to create a tag for the products that you intend to have in a collection for the fall 2019 season. You could create a tag myfall19, but if that tag is shown in a filter menu in your online store, your customers might not know what it means. A better choice might be Fall-2019.

Tags aren't used by search engines, so don't use tags to try to improve search results for your online store. Instead, add keywords as explained in Adding keywords for SEO to your Shopify store.

Example product tag formats

  • Carol runs an online apparel store. She chooses to use tags to indicate the color and material of her products. For example, she uses the tags blue, red, black, and white, as well as cotton, linen, fleece, and denim. Because her online store theme uses the tags as filters on collection pages, a customer can then see all products that have both blue and cotton tags, or both blue and fleece tags.

  • In his herb and spice business, Pablo has dozens of blends. He decides to use short one-word tags for each ingredient: Basil, Parsley, Rosemary, and so on. He then applies multiple tags to each product. Later, he can create automated collections that use these tags as conditions.

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