Shopify’s website builder is one of the most accessible tools available for building an online store without technical knowledge. But accessible doesn’t mean simple — and the decisions you make about how your store is structured will have more impact on whether customers buy than any design decision you make in the theme editor.
This post covers how Shopify’s website builder actually works, what collections are and why they matter, how to structure your store’s navigation for both customers and search engines, and what to get right before you start customising how things look.
What is Shopify’s website builder?
Shopify is an all-in-one ecommerce platform — its website builder is built directly into the platform rather than being a separate tool you connect to it. When you create a Shopify account and choose a theme, you’re accessing the website builder through the theme editor: a visual interface that lets you build pages using sections and blocks without writing code.
The theme editor works on a section-based system. Each page is made up of sections — a hero banner, a product grid, a testimonial block, a text section — that you can add, remove, reorder and configure. Within each section are blocks — smaller elements that sit inside the section, like individual testimonials inside a testimonial section, or individual feature icons inside a feature row.
Most modern Shopify themes use the OS 2.0 architecture, which means sections can be added to almost any page — not just the homepage. This gives you significant flexibility to build out collection pages, product pages, and custom landing pages using the visual editor without needing developer help for layout changes.
What the website builder doesn’t do is determine how your products are organised or how customers find them. That’s the job of collections and navigation — and it’s where most new Shopify store owners make their most significant structural mistakes.
What are Shopify collections and why do they matter?
A collection is a group of products on your Shopify store. Collections are how your store is organised — they’re the categories a customer browses when they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for but have a general idea of the type of product they want.
Every product in your store should belong to at least one collection. Collections appear in your navigation, on your homepage, and as dedicated browse pages that customers land on from search engines. How you structure your collections determines how intuitively customers can navigate your store and how effectively Google can understand and index your catalogue.
Manual collections vs automated collections
Shopify offers two types of collections. Manual collections are ones you populate yourself — you select which products belong in each collection. Automated collections are ones where Shopify automatically adds products based on rules you set — product tag, price range, vendor, title, and so on.
Automated collections are almost always the better choice for stores with more than a handful of products. Once the rules are set, any new product that meets the criteria is added to the collection automatically. You tag a new product as ‘summer’ and it appears in your summer collection without any additional work. For manual collections, you have to remember to add each new product to every collection it should belong to — which becomes increasingly error-prone as the catalogue grows.
How to structure your collections
The starting point for collection structure is understanding how your customers think about your products, not how you think about them as a business owner. A customer browsing a homewares store doesn’t organise products by supplier or SKU — they think in terms of room (bedroom, kitchen, living room), product type (cushions, throws, candles), or occasion (gifts, new home, Christmas).
Collection structure should mirror customer intent. If your best customers browse by room and by product type, you probably need both types of collections. If they browse primarily by occasion, your collection structure should lead with that.
A common mistake is creating too many top-level collections and not enough depth within them. A store with twenty top-level collections and three products in each is harder to navigate than one with five well-populated collections and clear subcategories within them. Start with your primary browsing categories and add refinement as the catalogue grows.
The collection structure you build at the start of your store is significantly harder to change later than the visual design. URL structures, navigation hierarchies, and the internal linking between pages all depend on how collections are set up. Getting the structure right before you start adding products saves significant remediation work later.
Collection page design in the Shopify website builder
A collection page is the browse page for a group of products. It’s where customers land when they click a category in your navigation, follow a collection link from your homepage, or find your category through Google. It needs to do one job well: help customers find the specific product they want as quickly as possible.
Product grid layout
The product grid is the core of a collection page — it’s the arrangement of product images, titles and prices that customers scan when browsing. Most Shopify themes allow you to configure the number of columns in the grid (typically two to four on desktop, one to two on mobile), whether to show pricing and ratings in the grid view, and whether to enable quick add-to-cart functionality from the grid.
The right grid layout depends on your product type. Products that benefit from large imagery — fashion, homewares, art — typically work better with fewer, larger grid items. Products where the customer needs to compare multiple options quickly — stationery, supplements, accessories — work better with more items per row at a smaller size.
Filtering and sorting
Filtering allows customers to narrow a collection by attributes — size, colour, price range, material, brand. For stores with more than twenty products in a collection, filtering is essential. Without it, customers have to scroll through everything to find what they want, and many will leave rather than do that work.
Shopify’s native filtering (called ‘storefront filtering’) works through product metafields and variant options. Setting it up correctly requires that your products are tagged and attributed consistently — every product that comes in a size needs a size variant, every product that comes in a colour needs a colour option. Inconsistent product data produces broken or misleading filters, which is worse than no filtering at all.
Sorting options — best selling, price low to high, newest, featured — should be available on every collection page. The default sort order matters: most stores perform better with best selling as the default because it surfaces the products most likely to convert to the top of the browse experience.
Collection page content
Most Shopify themes allow you to add a title, description, and image to each collection. The collection description is frequently left blank — which is a missed SEO opportunity. A one to three sentence description of what’s in the collection, written naturally with relevant keywords, gives Google more content to work with on a page that would otherwise contain only product data.
Collection descriptions should be written for the customer rather than for search engines. “Our range of handmade ceramic mugs, made in Victoria from local clay” is better than “Buy ceramic mugs online. Ceramic mugs for sale. Best ceramic mugs Australia.” Both help SEO but only one also helps the customer.
Navigation: connecting your collections to your customers
Navigation is how customers move between sections of your store. It determines how discoverable your collections are and how many clicks it takes for a customer to find what they’re looking for. Navigation is configured in Shopify under Online Store → Navigation, separately from the theme editor.
Main navigation structure
Your main navigation should reflect your primary collection structure. If a customer can’t see the category they want within the first glance at your navigation, they’ll either search (if your site search is good) or leave. The most effective navigation for most small ecommerce stores is a flat structure with five to eight top-level items, each linking to a collection or a collection-level landing page.
Dropdown menus allow you to add subcategories under each top-level item. This is useful when a top-level category contains enough variety to warrant subcategories — a clothing store with a ‘Women’s’ top-level item might have dropdowns for Tops, Dresses, Pants, Outerwear. Keep dropdowns to one level where possible. Two-level dropdowns work on desktop but become unusable on mobile.
Footer navigation
The footer is where customers look for secondary information — shipping policy, returns, about us, contact, FAQ. These pages should all be in the footer navigation. A footer that only links to collections misses the trust-building function that footer pages serve, particularly for first-time buyers evaluating whether to purchase.
Navigation and SEO
Every page linked in your main navigation receives internal link equity from every other page on the site. This means your top-level navigation links are some of the most valuable internal links in your store. Collections linked in the main navigation rank better than collections only accessible through browsing or search. If you have a high-priority collection — your most profitable category, your seasonal campaign, your clearance range — it should be in your main navigation.
What the Shopify website builder does well — and where its limits are
For most Australian small businesses starting a Shopify store, the built-in website builder is sufficient to create a professional, functional store without developer involvement. The section-based editor handles layout, the collection system handles organisation, and the navigation manager handles discoverability.
The areas where the website builder reaches its limits are consistent across most stores: complex custom layouts that go beyond what the theme’s section library includes, checkout customisation beyond colour and logo (which requires Shopify Plus or Checkout Extensibility apps), advanced filtering that goes beyond Shopify’s native metafield system, and performance optimisation that requires code-level changes to the theme.
For these requirements, a Shopify developer can extend what the website builder provides. But for the vast majority of small ecommerce stores, the built-in tools are more capable than most owners realise — the limiting factor is usually how they’re used, not what they’re capable of.
Building your Shopify store with Confetti Design
At Confetti Design we build Shopify stores for Australian businesses at every stage — from first stores where the collection structure and navigation are being set up for the first time, to established stores where a poorly structured catalogue is limiting growth. Our Shopify expertise covers the full range of store architecture decisions, from collection setup and navigation through to theme customisation and ongoing performance.
If you’re building your first Shopify store and want to understand the broader process before you start, our guide to building a Shopify store in Australia covers the key decisions at each stage.
If you have an existing store and want an honest review of whether your collection structure and navigation are working as well as they should, get in touch. We’ll look at your store specifically and tell you what’s holding it back.
Is Shopify’s website builder good for small businesses?
Yes — Shopify’s website builder is well suited to Australian small businesses that want to sell products online without significant technical involvement. The section-based theme editor is accessible to non-technical users, the collection system handles product organisation effectively, and the platform manages hosting, security and checkout infrastructure automatically. The main limitation is that the visual flexibility of the website builder is constrained by the theme you choose — some layouts and design outcomes require developer involvement to achieve within a given theme.
How many collections should my Shopify store have?
The right number depends on the size and variety of your catalogue. A store with twenty products might need three to five collections. A store with two hundred products might need ten to fifteen. The goal is not to have as many or as few collections as possible — it’s to have a structure that reflects how your customers think about your products. If your customers browse by product type, structure your collections around product types. If they browse by occasion or use case, structure around that. Test your navigation with someone who doesn’t know your store and see whether they can find a specific product within thirty seconds.
What is the difference between a Shopify collection and a Shopify product?
A product is an individual item in your store — it has a title, description, images, price, variants and inventory. A collection is a group of products — it’s the category or browse page that contains multiple products. A product can belong to multiple collections simultaneously. A collection page is what customers see when they click a category in your navigation; a product page is what they see when they click a specific item within that category.
Do Shopify collection pages rank on Google?
Yes — collection pages are some of the most commercially valuable pages on a Shopify store from an SEO perspective because they target category-level search intent. Someone searching ‘handmade ceramic mugs australia’ is more likely to land on a collection page than a specific product page. Collection pages that have a descriptive title, a short keyword-relevant description, well-structured product data, and internal links from the main navigation rank better than those that are left with default settings and no content beyond the product grid.
Can I customise Shopify collection pages without a developer?
Yes — to a meaningful degree. Most OS 2.0 Shopify themes allow you to add sections above and below the product grid on collection pages, configure the grid layout, enable or disable filtering and sorting, add a collection description, and upload a collection image or banner. These customisations are all available through the theme editor without code. The changes that typically require a developer are custom filter layouts, non-standard grid arrangements, and performance optimisations to the collection page template.
How do I improve my Shopify store’s navigation?
Start by mapping your current collection structure and identifying whether it reflects how your customers browse rather than how you internally categorise your products. Check that your top-level navigation items match your primary collection categories. Ensure your five to ten most important collections are directly accessible from the main navigation without requiring dropdown expansion. Add footer navigation links for all policy and information pages. Test the navigation on mobile — dropdown menus that work on desktop often become unwieldy on mobile and may need to be simplified. Finally, check that any collections with significant organic traffic potential have a short, keyword-relevant description added to help search visibility.
