Brands and Tags
Two ways of grouping products that are not categories, and what each is actually for.
Categories are where a product lives. Brands and tags are two other ways of grouping, and they behave differently.
Brands
Catalog, Brands. A brand is who made or published the thing. A product has one brand, or none.
A brand carries a name, a slug, a description, a logo and a visibility flag. Shoppers get a page per brand listing everything from it, and your theme can offer a brand filter in the shop sidebar.
The label is yours to change
Many shops do not sell brands. A bookshop sells publishers, a gallery sells artists, a record shop sells labels. The word used on the storefront is a theme setting, so you can call them Publishers and never see the word Brand again.
A brand can be pinned, which floats its products above everything else in listings. That is useful for a shop that publishes its own titles alongside things it distributes. It is also easy to forget: a pinned brand with several hundred products changes the order of every listing in the shop, in every sort. See How Listings Are Ordered for what that does to a shopper's chosen sort.
Tags
Catalog, Tags. A tag is a loose label. A product can have as many as you like.
Tags are for the groupings that cut across your categories: Award Winner, Signed, Staff Pick, Pre-order, Last Few. A shopper can browse a tag, and your theme can show them on a product.
Which to Use
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| The publisher, maker or label | Brand |
| The subject or department | Category |
| A loose label that cuts across everything | Tag |
A product has one brand, sits in several categories and can carry many tags. If you find yourself wanting two brands on one product, what you actually want is a tag.
Keeping Them Under Control
Tags multiply. A shop that lets everybody add them freely ends up with Signed, signed, Signed Copy and Author Signed, which is four tags doing one job and four pages a shopper might land on.
Agree the list before you start, keep it short, and check Catalog, Tags occasionally for near duplicates.
Brands have the opposite problem: they are rarely reviewed, so a publisher that stops being stocked sits in the filter forever with nothing behind it. Make an empty brand inactive rather than leaving it listed.
Brands and the Publisher Filter
Where your theme offers a brand filter, it lists brands that have visible products. A brand with everything out of stock or hidden may disappear from the filter entirely, which looks like a fault and is not.
If a brand is missing from the filter, check how many of its products are active and visible before looking anywhere else.