When a shopper browses the marketplace they can narrow the results by Colour, Material, Occasion, Pattern and Size. Those filters are built from product attributes. If your listing has no attributes, it disappears the moment someone filters. This guide explains the two kinds of attribute and which to use.
Marketplace attributes: these power the filters
These are shared across every shop and they are what the sidebar filters use. There are five: Colour, Material, Occasion, Pattern and Size. Adding them to a listing costs nothing and does not change how the product page looks. It simply means your product is included when someone filters by, say, blue or birthday.
Add them to every listing, including simple products with no variations:
- Open the product and go to the Attributes section.
- In Add Attribute choose Colour, then tick the colours that apply. A blue and white striped mug is both Blue and White.
- Repeat for Material, Occasion, Pattern and Size where they make sense. Not every attribute suits every product, so skip the ones that do not.
- Leave Use for variations unticked unless the choice changes the price or stock.
- Save.
One tip: always use Colour rather than the American “Color” entry if you see both. The filters use Colour.
Custom attributes: private to your shop
Under Settings, then Attributes, you can create your own, such as Fragrance, Wood type or Font. Nobody else sees them. They do two jobs: they act as filters on your own shop page, and they can be used to build variations (Fragrance: Lavender, Rose, Cedar). They do not appear in the marketplace-wide filters, so use them alongside the marketplace attributes, not instead of them.
Which should I use?
- Something shoppers filter by across the whole site (a colour, a material, an occasion): marketplace attribute.
- Something specific to your craft that shoppers pick between on your product page: custom attribute, usually with Use for variations ticked.
- Both is often right. A lavender candle in a blue jar has Colour: Blue (marketplace) and Fragrance: Lavender (custom).
Checking it worked
Open the shop as a visitor, filter by one of the values you added, and look for your product. If it is missing, open the listing and check the attribute is saved and the product is published. Search results and ranking are a separate topic, covered in How product ranking works.