The kind of product chosen from Shopify's standard list, such as Apparel › Shirts, which gives the product its category fields (color, size, material) and helps taxes and marketplaces read it.
Every Shopify product can have a category, picked from Shopify’s standard product taxonomy: a shared list of thousands of kinds of products, such as Apparel & Accessories › Clothing › Shirts & Tops.
The category does three things:
- It adds category fields to the product: Color, Size, Fabric, Neckline, whatever fits the kind of product. They are metafields Shopify defines for you.
- It gives options their swatches, when an option is linked to one of those fields, such as Color to Color.
- It helps others read the product: tax rules in some countries, and channels such as Google and marketplaces.
The category is not the product type, which is your own free word. A product can have both.
In Webflow terms
Think of it as a CMS reference to a list Shopify maintains for every store, which comes with its own set of fields.
In Smootify
The category fields are metafields, so metafield="…" with their namespace shows them like any other. Their main use on a Smootify site is the swatches of the pickers: see Swatch colors and images.
More in Metafields.