Best Practices

Being successful long term means having the little details right from the start. Here's a list of things to double check before you dive into using our Shopify integration.

Category Settings

Categories can often be thought of as Collections in Shopify, though they aren't always a 1 to 1 match. They both group inventory together for better organizing, reporting, and searching.

Running some reports to determine how many items you have in certain categories will help you decide how to group your items online.

For example, if you have the following categories with the following item counts then you may be better served by mapping these three categories into one Jewelry collection in Shopify. You probably wouldn't want just a collection of just rings as it may look like you don't have any inventory if your theme expects 30 items on one page.

Category	Item Count
Necklace	12
Earrings	8
Rings	5

On the other hand, if you have this situation. You may want to map the categories directly to their own collections such that Sneakers category goes to a Sneakers collection.

Category	Item Count
Sneakers	527
Heels	134
Boots	76

Inventory Type

Inventory type in SimpleConsign controls the attributes that display when you add an item to a category. This allows you to enter more detail about your items for better reporting and are especially important for building collections online.

As a general rule, you don't want any categories listed as "Default" inventory type and should tend toward the "Clothing" inventory type or the "Book" inventory type as appropriate.

You can get creative with the fields. For example, you may think the "Clothing" inventory type isn't appropriate for a category of Candles, but you can use the size to note how many ounces the candles are, the color to record the scents, and the family group to keep track of whether it's a masculine or feminine scent.