Commerce · 3 min read
Ecommerce Tag Strategy
Tagging a catalogue so products, collections and content stay connected.
One vocabulary across the catalogue
Product tags, collection filters and content tags should use the same words. When a shop tags a product 'linen' and the blog tags the matching article 'flax linen', the internal links between them never form and the customer never crosses from reading to buying.
Write the vocabulary down before tagging anything, and prefix internal-only tags so they never leak into customer-facing filters.
Tag the attributes people filter by
Customers filter by material, size, colour, use case and price band. Those are the attributes worth encoding as tags. Marketing adjectives are not filters and belong in the description instead.
Keep social separate but derived
Social hashtags for a product should derive from the same vocabulary but be formatted for the platform: camel case, hash prefixed, and trimmed to a usable count. Deriving rather than reinventing keeps the store and the social account describing the same thing.