Using Product Tags - Etsy versus Shopify

If you’re reading this, you probably have (or had) a shop on Etsy and are now getting started on Shopify. You might have even already imported your Etsy products into your Shopify store. But what about those tags?

Here’s the deal…

Tags on Shopify are COMPLETELY different than Tags on Etsy.

In a nutshell, product Tags on Etsy are there to help customers; product Tags on Shopify are there to help you (the store owner).

Let me explain…

Tags On Etsy:

Tags are used in Etsy searches as a way for customers to find your items. In this sense, Etsy Tags are extra keywords.
Tags are NOT searchable by search engines outside of Etsy. Therefore, they have NO IMPACT on your SEO outside of Etsy.

Tags on Shopify:

Tags are mainly used on Shopify to help ORGANIZE products and work with similar products in bulk editing.
Customers do NOT see your product tags.
Tags can be used to help customers find your products, BUT, that is NOT the main purpose of Shopify Tags. AND, since Shopify Tags are not indexed by search engines, you should instead use those keywords within your product description (not as a tag).
Tags are NOT searchable by search engines outside of Shopify. Therefore, they have NO IMPACT on your SEO outside of Shopify.

Okay. Now you know the difference between product tags on Etsy and product tags on Shopify. But what else do you need to know regarding tags? Here are my tips…

Tips for Using Tags:

I highly recommend you do not use your Etsy Tags on your Shopify product listings. If you haven’t uploaded your CSV file from Etsy to Shopify yet, I recommend you remove the TAGS from your CSV before importing it into Shopify. This way, each product on Shopify will start with no tags on the listing page. (Trust me on this. I learned the hard way. It’s much easier to remove the tags in your CSV file than it is to remove the tags from each and every product listing once those products are imported into Shopify).
If your tags have already been imported into Shopify, they will have an underscore (_) between the words instead of spaces. This is due to the way Etsy processes the CSV file. Because of these underscores, those tags are USELESS on Shopify, because a customer would have to type the tag EXACTLY as it shows in your Tags area. For example, if the tag was “elephants_and_zebras”, if a customer searched your store for “elephants” or for “zebras”, they would NOT find your product (assuming you didn’t have those words in your titles or descriptions). The customer would have to type “elephants_and_zebras” (with the underscores) in order to find the products with that tag. NOT something a customer would ever do. Therefore, this is another reason to remove your Etsy tags from your Shopify listings.
Tags on Shopify can be used to help you bulk edit your products. For example, if you add a holiday tag to your holiday items (such as the word Christmas), you can then create a product filter in the All Products list to show only products tagged with the word Christmas. From there, you can select all those products and bulk hide them from your store in the Summer. Pretty slick, huh?!
As a more advanced feature, Tags can be used to create Automatic Collections and Filters for your Collection Pages. For more information, click Using Tags from the Shopify Help Manual.