Shopify

I didn't learn this from a client. I learned it from a mess I made myself. My store is Collage and Wood: about 162 handmade products. Collages, wooden letters, signs, props, blankets. Real inventory, real customers, real orders coming in the whole time. It looked fine. That was the problem. When I finally audited it properly against a written spec, I found 322 taxonomy and feed violations sitting in a catalog I would have told you was in good shape. What 322 violations actual

"Metafield" is a terrible word for a simple thing. Here's the whole idea: a metafield is a box for information that Shopify didn't give you a box for. Shopify gives you boxes for title, description, price, weight. It does not give you a box for occasion, or audience, or what room this goes in, or how to care for it. Your business needs those. Shopify's default product page doesn't have them. So you add them. The box you add is a metafield. That's it. That's the concept. Shopi

A product taxonomy sounds like something a librarian would want and a store owner would never need. Here's the plain version: a taxonomy is the fixed set of questions you ask every single product, and the fixed set of answers each question is allowed to have. That's it. Not software. Not a project. A short list of questions, and the answers you'll accept. For my store, the questions are things like: What occasion is this for? Who is it for? What's it made of? And the allowed

Nobody's catalog looks like a mess. That's the whole trouble. A messy catalog doesn't look messy. It looks like a store. The products are there, the photos are good, the prices are right, the orders come in. Nothing is flashing red. There's no screen in Shopify that says your product data is inconsistent and it's costing you money. The mess is invisible because it lives in the fields nobody looks at. And it shows itself indirectly, in three specific symptoms that most owners

A manual collection never breaks. That's the problem. It doesn't throw an error. It doesn't turn red in your admin. It just sits there, holding the eleven products you put in it back in March, while the fourteen products you've added since sit outside it, invisible to every shopper who clicks that link in your menu. Nothing tells you. The collection looks fine. It's just quietly, permanently out of date, and it will stay that way until you remember to go fix it by hand. What

"The Riley" is a beautiful product name. It is also, to Google, gibberish. Nobody types "the Riley" into a search bar. They type "personalized wood family name sign." If your title says the first thing and your shopper says the second, you don't have a ranking problem. You have a translation problem, and it's the single cheapest thing to fix in your entire catalog. The number nobody tells you: 150 vs 70 Here's the rule that changes how you write titles forever. Google lets yo

I'll go first: for a long time, my own store had no filters at all. Not broken filters. Not badly configured filters. None. A shopper landed on a collection with dozens of products, and their only option was to scroll until they gave up. I want to be clear about why that happened, because it's the same reason it's probably happening to you: I thought filters were a theme feature. Something you switch on in settings. They aren't. Filters are built from your product data, and i

Your product says Limited. Or Under review. Or Disapproved. Three different words, three completely different levels of "should I panic?" Most store owners treat all three the same and panic at all of them. That's backwards, and it costs you twice: you burn a weekend "fixing" something that was never broken, while the thing that is quietly bleeding money sits there untouched. Here's what each one actually means, in plain English, and exactly which one to fix first. The short

3 free checks to see if your shopify feed is leaking money

blog graphic header for "Why Your Shopify Products Aren't Showing In Google Shopping.

A Conversation About AI Search, Shopify and Featuring Garrett Sussman on the Simple & Smart SEO Show Are keywords dead? Is AI search the new front door to your business? And what the heck is a “query fan-out”? In this episode of the Simple & Smart SEO Show , Crystal Waddell chats with Garrett Sussman, Director of Marketing at iPullRank, about how artificial intelligence is completely reshaping the rules of SEO. Especially for Shopify store owners. From ChatGPT partnerships to

Struggling to learn SEO? Experiencing a decline or plateau in organic traffic? You're not alone. Most search engine optimization (SEO) courses feel like they’re written by robots. They are often packed with jargon or assume you already have years of digital marketing experience. I get it— I was there too. That’s exactly why I created CrystalGPT , a custom AI tutor that helps you learn SEO in just 7 steps , even if you’re starting from scratch. Finally, SEO advice that builds

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