Shopify for distributors9 min read
Shopify product pages for technical products
Shopify's default product template was designed for a t-shirt. Technical products need four things it does not give you.
ReadShopify's default product template was designed for a garment. It assumes a large photograph does most of the selling, that the description is persuasive prose, and that the buyer is choosing between colours. For a technical distributor all three assumptions are wrong.
A buyer specifying a component is not browsing. They have a requirement and they are checking whether your product meets it. That needs four things on the page: a specification table they can scan rather than read, a datasheet that is obviously placed and hosted by you rather than hotlinked, search that finds a part number however it was typed, and enough information to specify without contacting you.
Part-number search is where most technical Shopify stores lose the sale, and it is invisible in analytics because the customer simply leaves. Technical buyers arrive with a code from a drawing or a competitor's quote and paste it into your search box. If the part number lives only in a metafield, or they typed it with a dash and you stored it without, you have lost somebody who was ready to buy.
Every improvement to a technical product page is a data problem wearing a design costume. A theme can only display what your data already contains — so a specification table needs structured attributes, part-number search needs the part number stored consistently, and a hosted datasheet needs the file to exist somewhere you control.
Guides in this topic
Commissioned and scheduled
See it against your own catalogue.
Thirty minutes. Bring three supplier URLs and we will capture them live, so you are judging the output rather than the pitch.