The Difference Between Collections vs. Categories in Shopify

Shopify collections and Shopify categories are often confused with one another — in fact, many merchants seem to believe that these terms can be used interchangeably.

But collections and categories actually refer to two distinct Shopify features. Below, we’ll explain exactly what these features are and how they can contribute to your store’s success.

Collections vs. Categories: What’s the Difference?

A Shopify collection is a set of multiple products that have been grouped together by a merchant. For example, a clothing store might have collections for jackets, shirts, and pants. This can make it easier for visitors to navigate your site, potentially improving user experience.

It’s important to note that these collections are not created automatically. Whenever you want to create a collection, you’ll need to set it up yourself through the Shopify admin: 

• After logging in to Shopify, select the “Products” option in the left sidebar of the main control panel.
• Select “Collections”.
• Click on the “Create collection” button. 
• Set up the details for your new collection, then select “Save”. 

To determine which products are included in the collection, you have two options: you can make it either a manual collection or a smart collection. 

• Manual collection: Browse through your catalog and select each product that you want to be included. 
• Smart collection: Create a condition (or multiple conditions) for which products will be included (e.g., all items with a price under $25). If you ever add a new product to your catalog in the future that meets these conditions, it will automatically be added to the collection.

After you create a collection in Shopify, a new page will be published on your store that displays all the products in the collection. And when a visitor clicks on one of the products featured on a collection page, this will take them directly to that product page.

The design of this collection page will depend on which Shopify theme you’re using. Also, you could link to the collection page in one of your store’s menus in order to help more people discover it.

As for Shopify categories, this feature is more for tax purposes.

Whether it’s a city, county, state, or country, most tax jurisdictions have their own unique set of rules. Different types of products are often taxed at different rates — depending on the destination, some products may not be taxed at all, while others may be taxed at relatively high rates.

To calculate what these rates should be for each order, Shopify uses its Standard Product Taxonomy. For example, a pair of sunglasses should be mapped to the categories of Apparel and Accessories (Level 1) > Clothing Accessories (Level 2) > Sunglasses (Level 3). 

So, one key difference here is that Shopify collections need to be created manually, but Shopify categories already exist. Indeed, a category will even be assigned automatically whenever you create a new product directly through the Shopify admin. This is made possible with Shopify Magic — artificial intelligence is used to determine which category a product should be assigned to, based on the data you’ve entered such as the product name, product description, and product image.

This automatically assigned category should only be taken as a suggestion, as there’s no guarantee that it is correct (or, a product may be assigned to the correct Level 1 category but would be more accurate if you went deeper and manually assigned it to a more specific Level 2, 3, 4, etc. category). In order to ensure that taxes are being calculated correctly, you should review which category each of your products has been assigned to:

• Select the “Products” option in the left sidebar of the main Shopify dashboard.
• Click on the product that you want to edit — this will take you to the product details page.
• Scroll down to the “Category” dropdown menu, review which category has already been selected, and change it if necessary.

If you’ve added products through a third-party app or CSV upload, then the category for the product may be showing up as “Uncategorized” instead of being automatically assigned. In that case, you’ll need to go in and assign the category manually.

Also, when a product is assigned to a particular category, this unlocks a set of pre-defined metafields on the product details page. For example, the unlocked metafields for a product in the “Sunglasses” category include lens polarization, eyewear frame design, eyewear frame color, and several other options. While you can always add metafields to a product yourself, having a few of the most common fields that are associated with a type of product already created for you can save an enormous amount of time in the long run. 

And it’s also worth noting that if you’d like to publish a category as a collection, you could do so by setting up a smart collection that has the condition of only including products that belong to that category (or multiple categories). 

To sum this all up, we’ve broken down the key similarities and differences of Shopify collections vs. categories in the table below:

	Collections	Categories
Are they used to group similar products together?	Yes	Yes
Do you need to set them up yourself?	Always	Not in most cases; they are usually assigned automatically
Do they have their own page on your storefront?	Yes	Only if used as a condition to create a collection
Are they used to establish tax rates?	No	Yes
Can a single product be assigned to multiple?	Yes	No

When It’s Best to Use Collections

Whether or not you should use collections depends on the number of products that you sell. 

If you run a single-product store, then obviously there’s no need. 

Even if you sell a handful of products, breaking up your catalog might do you more harm than good — in that case, you may just be adding unnecessary steps to the customer journey, when it would have been possible for visitors to easily find everything on a single catalog page. Remember, the more effort it takes to buy something on your store, the more likely it is that the customer will get distracted and move on to something else before completing their purchase.

But once the number of products you sell gets into the double digits, then the benefits of collections start to outweigh any potential downsides. Collections are certainly worth implementing if you sell hundreds or thousands of products, as many merchants do. 

Sure, this may require customers to make a couple more clicks in order to get to an individual product page. But it may not be reasonable to expect customers to sort through your entire catalog — even with search and filters, this can be a painful user experience, and many visitors will just back out instead. 

By breaking up a large catalog into a series of collections, you can make it much easier for visitors to find what they’re looking for (and discover additional products that they may be interested in as well), resulting in more sales for your store.

When It’s Best to Use Categories

As a general rule, you should use categories for all your products. Shopify will usually assign categories automatically anyway, and it’s good practice to check these assignments to see if they could be made more accurate. As mentioned above, this will help ensure that the taxes on your orders are being calculated correctly.

But in some cases, you may want to set a different tax rate for certain products than what Shopify establishes with its automated category-based system. You can do this with Shopify’s tax override feature:

• Create a manual collection for all the products you want to exclude from Shopify’s standard tax rates.
• Select the “Settings” option in the left sidebar of the main Shopify control panel.
• Select the “Taxes and duties” option in the left sidebar of the settings page.
• In the “Regional settings” section, select the region you want to edit (e.g., “United States”).
• Scroll down to the “Product overrides” section and select “Add override”.
• Select the collection you just created, plug in the custom tax rate you want, then click on the “Add override” button.

Once a tax override has been saved in your store settings, it will always take precedence over the product category tax calculations.

Using Shogun Page Builder To Import and Edit Collection Pages

The easiest way to create highly customized collection pages for your Shopify store is to use the Shogun Page Builder app. 

If you’d like to use Shogun to edit a collection page that already exists on your Shopify store, you’ll first need to import it:

• After installing Shogun Page Builder, select the “Apps” option in the left sidebar of the main Shopify control panel.
• Open Shogun Page Builder. 
• Hover your cursor over “Build or edit a page”, then select the “Import a page” option.
• Go to the “Collection” tab, then click on the “Import page” button next to the page that you want to import. 
• Select a page layout option. The “Layout from Shopify theme” option will not allow you to remove the heading or product grid that’s carried over from the original collection page, while the “Shopify 2.0 sections” option will allow you to remove any part of the page you want. Then, click on the “Import this page” button. 

Once the import is complete, a popup will appear with an “Edit in Shogun” button, which you can click on to open up the page in Shogun’s editor. 

In the left sidebar of the editor, you’ll find Shogun’s element library, which offers dozens of features that you can add to the page with just a couple clicks. This includes structure elements (Columns, Tabs, Accordion, etc.), which allow you to get the layout of the page exactly the way you want it, as well as content elements (Text, Image, Countdown, etc.), which gives you complete control over all the information you’d like to present on the page.

There’s also a Shopify section in the element library, which contains elements that pull data directly from your Shopify catalog. That means you won’t need to go through the tedious process of inputting product data manually. 

One of the options in this Shopify section is the Collection element — if you add this element to the page, you’ll be prompted to select which collection in your catalog you want to connect it to. Then, when you add other Shopify elements into your Collection element, such as Price or Description, the corresponding data will automatically pop up on the page. Convenient, right?

Each element in Shogun offers a wide variety of options for customizing its styling and functionality. For example, the Price element allows you to pick a new font, increase or decrease the size of the text, change the color of the text, determine what message is displayed when the product is sold out, and much more.

So, down to the very last detail, Shogun gives you the power to create any page design that you can imagine.