Updating content for large catalog stores

As your product catalog grows you may run into problems you never had. Specifically around the 1,000 product mark, managing things starts to get overwhelming.

I recently heard from a store who was having trouble managing a large catalog. Their main issue was fixing product descriptions, page titles, and SEO descriptions. They were asking for any shortcuts to help.

Many parts of Shopify are what's called scalable. That means it's just as easy to have 10 products as it would be to have 1,000 products.

Collection filtering, adding to cart, product page rendering, etc are a few things that are scalable. With a few exceptions, they just work with any (reasonable) number of products.

Product descriptions, titles, SEO descriptions, images, those are all content. And content, generally speaking, doesn't scale.

Each piece of content is something unique you have to create and give to Shopify. They don't make that up for you.

Shopify makes some areas easier than others. For example, they'll automatically create page titles from your product name. Or an SEO description from your product description. So when you spend the time to create a great product name and description, Shopify can automatically use those to create the page title and SEO description.

Now there are some tools in Shopify that can help. I wouldn't call them shortcuts, that implies you get to the same result. These tools might make you faster at creating content but they still require a person.

Shopify has a bulk editor that will let you quickly update a lot of content for products. You'd still need to create the content but getting that into Shopify can be quicker than clicking through multiple pages.

There also are templates and AI tools such as Shopify Magic that claim to create content for you. With some input from you, they'll create a bunch of content for you to use. Best case, if they do work as they claim you'll still need to review and approve everything they create. Worst case, you'll spend more time cleaning up their mess than if you created the content yourself.

You must review everything those tools create. If those tools promise something or make a claim you can't fulfill, that's your fault. They also have no clue what you can and can't legally claim.

What often works best is to hire and train people to create the content for you. When you get to 1,000+ products you have plenty of things those writers can work on for you. With products, I recommend they start with your bestsellers and work down. That way your best products get a SEO boost sooner.

If you have 1,000s of products but can't hire a writer you have two choices:

1. prioritize your best products and work through them, knowing you'll probably never update some products, or
2. reduce your product catalog, removing the worst-sellers and ones that never sell

All this content stuff might seem annoying when all you want to do is sell your products but the Internet is built on content. Text, articles, images, videos... the format changes but content has always been and will always be the foundation. Shortcuts or hacks to skip creating content will eventually fall-flat or cause problems in the long-term.

With JSON-LD for SEO, we can support any number of products. As you update the content in Shopify, our structured data is automatically updated.