Shopify tags are short text labels you attach to store records. This includes products, orders, customers, transfers, draft orders, and blog posts. Merchants can sort, filter, group, and automate them with tags.
You can use them to build automated collections, segment customers, route orders, and speed up admin search. Tags are for internal organization and automation. This is not a direct search engine ranking factor.
This guide explains Shopify tags, including their types and why having an organized store is crucial.
What are Shopify tags?
Shopify tags are customizable labels that you attach to specific records in your Shopify admin.
For example, you might add:
- summer-sale to seasonal products
- vip to loyal customers
- fragile to orders requiring special handling
- preorder to draft orders
- black-friday to a discount
Tags are specific to each Shopify section. A product tag is not automatically available as an order, customer, or discount tag, even when the wording is the same.
Tags are useful when you need flexible labels for grouping, searching, filtering, or automation.
What are the various types of Shopify tags?
Product tags
Product tags help you organize products, filter your catalog, create automated collections, and improve storefront search.
For example, you can tag products with labels such as waterproof, new-arrival, or clearance.
Product tags are useful for organization, but they should not replace product categories, variants, options, or metafields.
Transfer tags
Transfer tags help you organize inventory transfers between Shopify locations.
You could use tags such as urgent, warehouse-east, or weekly-restock to group similar transfers and find them quickly from the Transfers page.
Customer tags
Customer tags help you group customers according to characteristics or business rules.
For example, you might use vip, wholesale, repeat-customer, or support-needed. You can then use these tags as conditions when creating customer segments for marketing, customer service, or loyalty campaigns.
Tags alone do not send emails or messages. They provide the condition that Shopify Flow, Shopify Messaging, or another marketing app can use to start an action.
Order tags
Order tags help your team organize and process orders.
Common examples include priority, gift-order, local-delivery, manual-review, and fragile. You can filter the Orders page by tag and save order views for workflows your team uses regularly.
Draft order tags
Draft order tags help classify orders that have not yet been completed.
You might use tags such as preorder, phone-order, wholesale-quote, or invoice-pending. When a draft order is converted into an order, its tags are carried over to the completed order.
Blog post tags
Blog post tags help organize related articles and allow visitors to explore posts by topic.
For example, a Shopify resource blog could use tags such as shopify-seo, store-speed, or conversion-tips. Avoid creating too many overlapping tags because this can make your blog structure difficult to manage.
Discount tags
Discount tags help merchants organize discounts by campaign, season, audience, or internal purpose.
For example, you could tag discounts with summer-sale, vip-offer, or influencer-campaign. You can then filter the Discounts page to find related promotions more quickly.
How many tags can you add? Shopify tag limits & rules
Before you build a tagging system, it helps to know the limits Shopify enforces. These apply whether you add tags manually or through an app:
- Up to 250 tags per product, customer, transfer, blog post, order, and draft order.
- Up to 5 tags per discount.
- Shopify Plus stores get unlimited product tags.
- Character limits: products, customers, transfers, blog posts, and discounts allow up to 255 characters per tag; orders and draft orders are capped at 40 characters.
- Allowed characters: only letters, numbers, and hyphens. Accented letters and symbols (like &, +, _) can break search and automated collections.
- Tags aren't case-sensitive: Red and red count as the same tag.
- Only your store's first 5,000 unique product tags show up in the tag-suggestion dropdown. Tags beyond that still work. You just have to type them exactly.
How to add Shopify tags in your store?
You can create a new tag directly from the details page of a product, transfer, customer, blog post, order, draft order, or discount.
Creating tags in Shopify
Follow these steps:
Open the relevant product, transfer, customer, blog post, order, draft order, or discount in your Shopify admin.
Find the Tags section.
3. Enter a new tag or select an existing tag from the list.
4. Click Save.
When you enter a new tag, Shopify creates it automatically for future use within that section.
Adding or removing Shopify tags in bulk
You do not need to open the full bulk editor just to add or remove tags.
To update multiple records:
- Open the relevant list in Shopify, such as Products, Customers, Orders, Transfers, Blog posts, Drafts, or Discounts.
- Select the records you want to update.
- Click the … menu.
- Select Add tags or Remove tags.
5. Choose the required tags.
6. Click Save.
Shopify also allows order tags to be added or removed in bulk through the Shopify mobile app.
Common strategies for utilizing Shopify tags
Tags are most useful when they support a clear store-management process. Here are some practical ways to use them.
Improve admin organization and storefront search
Tags make it easier to search for and group related products, transfers, customers, blog posts, orders, draft orders, and discounts in your Shopify admin.
Product tags can support product discovery. For example, adding the tag waterproof can help a waterproof product appear when a customer searches for that term, even when the exact word is not used in the product title.
Do not add unrelated keywords simply to influence search results. Every tag should have a clear organizational or discovery purpose.
How to automate Shopify tags?
Tagging by hand works fine for a small catalog, but it doesn't scale. Once you're processing hundreds of orders or thousands of products, automation keeps your tags consistent without the manual effort.
Shopify Flow (free): Shopify's own automation app lets you build no-code workflows that add or remove tags automatically based on conditions you set. For example, tag any order over a certain value as high-value, or tag repeat buyers as returning customers.
Flow comes with a template library and connects to metafields, Slack, and other apps.
Auto-tag apps: If you need more advanced rules, dedicated tagging apps let you auto-tag products, orders, and customers in real time. Look for one that supports the resource types you actually need and offers a free tier to start.
CSV import: For a one-time bulk job, Shopify's product CSV import includes a Tags column separate multiple tags with commas. It's the fastest way to tag a large product catalog in a single upload.
How to filter records by tag in Shopify
To filter products, transfers, blog posts, orders, draft orders, inventory variants, or discounts:
- Open the relevant page in your Shopify admin.
- Click Search and filter.
- Select Tag.
- Choose the tag you want to filter by.
For customers, create a customer segment that uses the customer tag as a condition. This is more flexible than applying a basic list filter and allows you to save and reuse the segment.
How to build automated collections using tags
Tags can be used as conditions in automated, also called smart, collections.
Follow these steps:
- Go to Products > Collections.
- Create a new collection.
- Select the automated collection option.
- In the Conditions section, choose Product tag.
- Select whether the tag must be equal to or not equal to the value.
- Enter the exact product tag.
- Click Save.
For example, an automated collection using the condition Product tag is equal to clearance automatically includes products tagged clearance. Products are added or removed as their tags change.
Use exact and consistent tag names. Special characters and inconsistent formatting can cause unexpected matches in automated collection conditions.
Do Shopify tags help SEO? Product tags & search explained
I want to be clear on this: Shopify product tags are not a direct search engine ranking factor. Tags aren't used by search engines, so adding keyword-stuffed tags won't push your product pages up in Google.
- The benefit: Tags power internal search, filters, and automated collections. When shoppers can find products faster, they browse longer and bounce less. These engagement signals can support your rankings over time.
- The risk: On some themes and apps, tags generate extra tagged-collection URLs (like /collections/name/tagged-value). These URLs sometimes become near-duplicate pages that waste crawl budget and bloat your index.
How to check if tag pages are hurting you?
Run this search on Google. site:yourstore.com/collections/ intitle:tagged. If dozens or hundreds of tagged pages appear, add a noindex tag or a canonical to them and resubmit your sitemap.
Don't confuse product tags with "SEO meta tags." The custom meta tags that actually affect SEO are your meta title and meta description. The snippet fields Google shows in search results. Optimize those for rankings, and use product tags purely for organization.
If you want tags to genuinely support discovery, focus them on how customers actually search. Specific attributes like waterproof-jacket or mens-running-shoe connect tags to well-optimized collection pages.
Shopify tags vs metafields: Which should you use?
Tags and metafields both store extra information about your products, but they're built for different jobs.
- A tag is a plain text label with no structure. It's perfect for grouping and filtering. Examples of tags are sale, vip, and fragile.
- A metafield is a structured custom field with a defined type (text, number, date, color, file, reference, and more) that stores a specific value. This is ideal for specs like material, dimensions, or warranty details.
For anything that should be machine-readable, for example, surfacing in AI shopping results, use metafields, not tags.
Use tags to organize and automate; use metafields to store real product data.
Shopify tags: Best practices & naming conventions
- Pick one format and stick to it. Decide on lowercase and hyphens (for example, spring-clearance) and use them everywhere.
- Choose singular or plural. Shopify treats dress and dresses as two different tags, which will affect your filtering.
- Be specific. Swap new for new-arrival-june so the tag stays meaningful over time.
- Keep tags short. Under 16 characters keeps them readable in the admin and in any storefront filter menu.
- Skip special characters. Stick to letters, numbers, and hyphens.
- Audit regularly. Merge near-duplicates (summer-sale-2024, summer-sale-2025 → summer-sale) to stay under the 5,000-tag suggestion limit.
Wrapping up
Online shopping behaviour is similar to offline shopping, where customers want to quickly find products, transfer customers, blog posts, place orders, or draft orders.
Shopify tags help customers browse your store effortlessly and find what they're looking for.
Using Shopify tags is crucial for organizing your e-commerce store and improving customer experience.
Descriptive and consistent tags are the key to keeping your store organized and making your store data more visible in searches. Whether it's products, customers, or blog posts, effective tag management can make your store run smoothly and boost your SEO.
FAQs
1. What are tags in Shopify?
Shopify tags are labels used to organize and filter products, customers, orders, transfers, blog posts, and discounts. Product tags can also support automated collections, bulk actions, and storefront searches, although they are not automatically displayed to customers.
2. How to add a best-seller tag in Shopify?
Go to Shopify Admin > Products, open the relevant product, and enter best-seller in the Tags field under Product organization, then click Add and Save. Tags are hidden from customers by default, so displaying a “Best Seller” badge may require a compatible theme setting, custom Liquid code, or a product badge app.
3. How to create product tags in Shopify?
Open a product from Products, locate the Tags field under Product organization, enter a new tag, click Add, and save the product. For multiple products, select them from the Products page and use More actions > Add tags to apply the tag in bulk.
4. How to delete tags in Shopify?
Open the product, click the x beside the tag in the Product organization section, and save your changes. To remove a tag from several products, select the products and use More actions > Remove tags.
5. Are Shopify tags case sensitive?
No, Shopify tags are not case-sensitive. This means Best-Seller and best-seller are treated as the same tag. However, it is still best to follow one consistent capitalization and naming format throughout your store.
6. Do Shopify tags help SEO?
Shopify tags do not directly improve your search engine rankings because Shopify states that search engines do not use product tags for SEO. Use your target keywords naturally in page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, headings, and page content.
About the author
Bhavesha Ghatode
Explore Content with Bhavesha, a passionate and dedicated technical content writer with a keen understanding of e-commerce trends. She is committed to sharing valuable insights, practical assets, and the latest trends that can help businesses thrive in a competitive environment.