Expanse Support: How should I organize my products and filters?

This documentation is for older versions of Expanse and no longer relevant to most merchants. Only continue reading if you're on a version before 2.0.0

Introducing Tag Groups

Tags are Shopify's most versatile organizational tool. With Expanse we've created a powerful filter feature that lets customers filter your collections by custom categories of tags, allowing them to quickly find what they're looking for without costly app add-ons.

Why Tags and not Type or Vendor?

Unfortunately Shopify does not let customers filter the collection they are looking at by the Type and Vendor fields for your products. Instead, we recommend also adding your Type and Brand as Tags.

Tagging your inventory

A general best practice is to add a Tag for any important characteristic of your product that you think would be a factor for two different audiences:

  • For yourself to organize your collections internally
  • For your customers to find what they are looking for

For example, you could tag a pair of pants with:

  • Women's
  • Pants
  • Clearance
  • Black
  • Raw denim
  • High-rise
  • Levi's

Internally, you could then use the Women's, Pants and Clearance tags to create automated collections for "Women's Pants" and "Women's Clearance".

Tags in Shopify are case sensitive. There is also a 1000 tag limit per store.

Setting up filter with tag groups in Expanse

To set up filters for your customers, open the Theme Editor, navigate to your collection, click on the Collection filter section and remove the "All tags" block that comes with the theme.

Now click Add content and choose Tag group, filling out the heading and tag lists for each group that you'd like. In our example, for a clothing store you could add groups for:

Color

  • Black
  • Blue
  • Charcoal
  • etc.

Material

  • Raw denim
  • Cotton
  • Leather

Fit

  • Mid-rise
  • High-rise
  • Bootcut

Brand

  • Dolce & Gabbana
  • Levi's
  • Guess

Note: The filter will only appear when your collection contains products tagged with at least two of the tags you've chosen.

Should I enable tag combinations?

Finally, the last thing to consider is whether or not to turn on the Enable tag combinations setting. Turn this on if you'd like your customers to filter by multiple tags at the same time (ex: show me products tagged with Levi's and Mid-rise).

Expanse Support