A manual collection organizes your products into groups, while also giving you complete
control over what products are included in it.
Manual collections are especially useful if you have a small variety of products, or if
your product line doesn’t change that often.
Keep watching to learn everything you need to know about creating manual collections.
To create a manual collection, start from your Shopify admin and click “Products”.
Then click “Collections” and then “Create collection.”
Start by giving the new collection a title.
Adding a description is optional, and is only visible if your theme has an option to show
it.
But you might want to create a description anyways using keywords for SEO purposes.
Now select “Manual” as the collection type.
Next, if you click “Edit website SEO”, you can make changes to the collection’s
search engine listing.
By default, search engines use the information from the collection’s title and description.
But I’m not going to make any changes to this section today.
Then decide where you want this collection to be visible by using the “Collection Availability”
card.
Deselect the checkboxes for the channels you want to exclude.
If you want to link the collection in your navigation menu, then you need to keep “Online
store” selected.
If you want to schedule this collection to be published at a future date, then click
”Schedule Availability” and select another date.
Keep in mind that you can only add a collection to your navigation menu after it’s been
published.
If you’d like, you can add an image to represent this collection.
But just remember that adding an image is optional, and will only be visible if your
theme has anoption to show it.
If you choose to add an image, be sure to also add ALT text for the image by clicking
“Edit” then “Edit image alt text”.
Alt text serves a couple different purposes.
If a media item can't load for any reason, then alt text is shown instead.
It's also used by assistive technology to describe an image to a customer who's visually
impaired.
Alt text can also boost your SEO, making it easier for customers to find your products.
Keep your alt text brief and descriptive.
The maximum length is 512 characters, but 125 or less is recommended.
Here I’ll write “Woman in child's pose wearing black yoga pants and a grey tank top
on a pink yoga mat” Now you’re ready to click “Save.”
The page is updated to show a “Products” section.
To add products to the collection, click “Browse” to see your inventory.
Scroll through to select items by clicking the checkboxes beside them.
You can also type a product title in the search bar to add an item.
Then click “Add” to finish.
To arrange the products, choose an option from the “Sort” dropdown menu.
If you choose to manually sort, then drag and drop the products in the order you want
them to appear.
To finish, you need to link the new collection in the store’s navigation bar so customers
can find it - this is not done automatically.
Click “Update your menu”, or click “Online Store”, then “Navigation”.
Click “Main Menu” and then click “Add menu item”.
Enter a name to match the collection.
Then in the “Link” field, select “Collections” and then find the collection you just created.
Click “Add”.
Click the six-dot icon beside the new menu item, and drag it where you’d like it to
appear.
If you want to create a dropdown menu, drag and drop it under another menu item to nest
it.
When you’re done, click “Save”.
To preview everything, click the eye icon next to “Online store” to open a new browser
tab.
Here you can see how the new collection looks in the dropdown menu we created.
You can also open the collection to confirm everything is in working order.
Now you know how to create manual collections.
If you have any questions, visit help.shopify.com for more information.