Getting started

In order to get the most out of Menus Uncomplicated, you first need to set up your store with Products, Collections and Menus. This screencast walks you through the process, including how to set up the menu items that form your categories.

Creating navigation more than 3 levels deep

Shopify Menus supports two ways of nesting menu items below menu items:

  • The Shopify Menus admin interface allows you to create a hierarchy of menu items, but only 3 levels deep.
  • Traditionally, menus were nested by creating a menu item with a name that matched another menu. This sort of legacy nesting is still supported.

While the modern Shopify Menus admin interface only supports 3 levels of navigation, you can still create more than 3 levels of navigation using legacy nesting.

It’s crucial to avoid duplicates category names or category URLs, especially if using legacy nesting, because Shopify cannot tell the difference between two menu items with the same name or URL. This video gives a full explanation:

Placing products in leaf categories and parents categories

You can have products appear in both leaf categories (most specific) and their parent categories, but the way Shopify is set up means that you have to tell it explicitly where you want each product to appear. That means adding a product to a leaf collection and its parent collections. This is best achieved using tags, such that:

  • You only have to tag a product once
  • Each collection defines its contents based on an ever broader set of tags

Each link in the category tree can only go to one place. Each one shows a collection. What products you put in that collection is within your control, so by arranging your products into multiple collections you can have them appear all through the category tree.

If you have a category tree that looks like this, from our demo store:

  • Technology
    • Computers
      • Desktops

You could place the Lenovo Desktop PC in just one collection, as here.

Alternatively you could place it in the Desktops collection and the Computers collection and the Technology collection. That’s not the way I’ve implemented it in my demo store, but it is possible.

Using tagging, you could tag the Lenovo Desktop PC as “Desktop PC”, then create collections that use that tag:

  • Technology, collection tags = [“Desktop PC”, “Laptop PC”, “Tablet”, “Server”, “Smartphone”, “Smart watch”, “Printers”…]
    • Computers, collection tags = [“Desktop PC”, “Laptop PC”, “Tablet”, “Server”]
      • Desktops, collection tags = [“Desktop PC”]

This is completely fine, but you can make it more streamlined by tagging products with their parents directly. For the Lenovo Desktop PC, you could tag it with “Desktops” and “Computers” and “Technology”. That means the collection tags are simpler to configure:

  • Technology, collection tags = [“Technology”]
    • Computers, collection tags = [“Computers”]
      • Desktops, collection tags = [“Desktop PC”]