Crystal Waddell

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 actually looked like...

"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. Shopify's own...

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 answers to...