Structure decided early saves reorganising hundreds of products later.
CATEGORIES
Think how a customer would look for things, not how you store them internally. Broad categories with a handful of subcategories beats a deep tree.
Aim for six to ten top-level categories. More than that and the menu becomes unusable on a phone.
TAGS
Use these for cross-cutting attributes: colour, material, occasion. Anything a customer might filter by that is not the main category.
Do not duplicate categories as tags. It creates two navigation systems that disagree.
ATTRIBUTES
Set up global attributes for anything used across products, such as size or colour. These power variations and filtering.
Define them once under Products > Attributes rather than per product, or filtering will not work properly.
NAMING
Be consistent and descriptive. "Blue cotton shirt, long sleeve" beats "Shirt 3". Product names appear in search results and order emails.
SKUS
Give every product one, even if you have twelve. It makes stock, orders and supplier conversations far easier later.
