Are large or small collections better?

Collections are the main way you have to organize products in Shopify.

How you organize your collections does require some planning and thought. Done wrong and your customers might not find the products they'd be interested in or end up in a lot of navigational dead-ends.

I also want to point out that I'm not talking about which way is better for SEO. From an SEO perspective, the size of your collection likely won't matter as much.

From a customer experience perspective, the number of products in a collection could be the difference of sales or no sales.

How to plan your collections

The big factors in how you setup your collections are:

• how many products do you have?
• how many clear distinctions do you have between products?

How many products is self-explanatory and easy to find.

How many distinctions is much more difficult. Basically you'd want to compare every product and list how they differ from every other product.

Doing this "right" would take a long time. Time not many people have, so guess.

Do you have 1 thing that makes your products different? (e.g. flavor)

Or 10? (e.g. school grade levels)

Or 100? (e.g. size and color)

Or 1,000? (e.g. make and model and year)

Rough numbers are what's important here.

When you have a small number of products or a small number of distinctions, you likely need very few collections. Especially if all of your products can fit on a single page. We'll call this the Small case.

A large number of products or a high number of distinctions will require more collections. Call this the Large case.

Falling somewhere in the middle is a bit more difficult. Having a moderate or large number of products or distinctions (e.g. more than "a few" but less than "a warehouse") may be harder to categorize your products.

Generally speaking, a collection should have between 5 - 50 products. Too few or too many in a given collection could lead to frustrated customers. These numbers are rough and may vary depending on your industry so use this as a guide.

The Small Case

If you fall into the Small case you can get by with a handful of collections.

You'll want to use your All collection (built-in to Shopify), especially in the main navigation. You might then divide your products into 2-3 more collections. For example: dogs and cats or light, medium or dark roasts.

With so few collections you should be able to really optimize each one. Make use of the collection description, image, etc.

The Large Case

On the other end of the scale is the Large case which comes from a high number of products or distinctions.

In this case, your main issue is likely discovery via browsing. You need to help customers quickly get into the right area so they can dig.

(Having a great store search engine or collection filters also pay off in this situation)

The problem you want to avoid is having a collection with 100s of products, spread across dozens of pages. After a few pages, only the most-dedicated shoppers will dig page-by-page.

For category organization use major distinctions as collections to divide up your products. Each time further sub-divide the products, getting finer and finer grained. Ideally you'd keep this up until you have around 20-50 products per collection.

(In software circles this sort of division is often compared to a tree. The trunk of the tree is the biggest part with the most items. It then divides into several branches, which each divide up into smaller branches, over and over until it gets to the stems with leaves.)

The hard part about this organization is defining it up-front and knowing when to change it. You'll often resist the process as it's easier to just cram in new products into the existing structure. The problem is that over-time the collections will become unbalanced. Some will have nearly no products and frustrate customers while others have pages after pages of them.

The Medium Case

Now for the in-between Medium case. This is when you have more products or distinctions than the Small case but not as much as the Large case.

Organizing for this case is going to be either really easy or really hard. That's because you're just going to follow the Small case but with more collections or Large case with less collections.

The hard part is deciding which way to lean. Go with the right one and it'll be easy-going. Go with the wrong one and you'll use more time than necessary.

For an easy way out, just go with the Small Case and promise yourself that when your product count doubles you'll come back and switch to the Large case.

For everyone else, here's some criteria to use to decide which way to go:

• Which way is typical for your industry? Small or Large? Go that way.
• Are you expecting to double your product count in the next 12 months? Go Large.
• Are 10% of your products responsible for the majority of your sales? Go Small, focusing on those products/collections.
• Short on time? Go Small and re-evaluate when you can.
• New store or with many new products? Go Small until you learn how the products differentiate.

If you're still unsure, err on going Small. Worst case you'll have some confused customers who resort to search or asking customer service. If you go Large you could fluster customers which typically causes them to leave.

Keep it manageable

Whichever path you choose, keep the number of products per collection manageable. Again aim for between 5 - 50 products and keep the differences between collections clear. If you customers can see and recall how your store is organized, they'll be able to find their way around without getting lost.