A Deeper Look at Tags in Shopify

Tags are an excellent way to add searchable, sortable, filterable attributes to your products. 

The Simple Case of Single Values

When adding a tag to a product, the ideal structure is to create a single-valued key:value pair, such as Color:Blue or Size:Medium.

Note: Each tag you create for a product will be stored by Shopify and will be available for all products in your store if you wish to add that tag to any other product.

Which delimiter should I use?

We strongly recommend using the colon (:) as your delimiter. While it is common practice to type the key:value pair with no spaces, key: value with a space after the colon is also acceptable. 

What if my product has multiple values I want to associate with it?

The ideal structure for providing multiple values for a product (such as a product that is available in both Red and Blue color options) is to add tags with the following structure:

Color:Red, Color:Blue

While it may seem more intuitive to create Color:Red,Blue to hold both color values for your product, this method would create more tags for Shopify to store, as the tag Color:Red,Blue will be retained as a tag in addition to Color:Red and Color:Blue.

Maintaining only a small list of single-valued color options that can be "tagged" to your product allows you to have several products with multiple colors attributed to them.

This same principle applies to any attribute you may want to add to your products. Fabrics, weights, materials, etc., can all be created in the same manner. By creating a tag for each option that can be applied to a product, you limit the number of tags that Shopify needs to store. Multiple tags can then be applied to any product.  

What if my attributes are more than one word long or contain weird characters?

Spaces, underlines, dashes and slashes are all allowed in labels and values for your tags. For example: Thread_Size, Thread-Size, and Thread Size are all legitimate labels, and Aqua Marine, Aqua_Marine, and Aqua-Marine are all legitimate values. However, we recommend consistency across all tags.

When creating tag labels and values, consistency is the most important factor. Color, color, and COLOR are three different words to a computer. So whether you choose to capitalize, use spaces, underlines, dashes or slashes, be consistent! 

How will the value display as a filter?

When creating values for your tags, create them in the way you want them to be viewed on your website. The tag label (i.e., "Thread Size") will not be seen and so can be formatted in all caps (THREAD SIZE). The value, however, (i.e., 3/4") should be written exactly how you would like it to display in your filters list on your live site. So THREAD SIZE: 3/4-inch will display as "3/4-inch" on your website. If you want 3/4" to be viewed, the tag needs to be formatted as THREAD SIZE: 3/4".