Product titles too short to be matched
Very short titles give an assistant almost nothing to align with how a shopper phrases a request. A product called Cap competes against every cap ever made.
In short
- The product stays in Shopify Catalog, but assistants have less to match against when a shopper describes what they want.
- Found in 79% of the catalogs we scanned.
- This one needs a human decision, so Endcap finds and groups it but does not write it for you.
Why this weakens matching
Very short titles give an agent little to match against how shoppers phrase requests.
Short titles give an agent too little to match against a shopper's phrasing.
How common it is
This appeared in 79% of the stores we scanned, affecting 6.9% of all products scanned. These are brands with staff and agencies, so it is not a small-merchant problem.
A short title is competing against the whole internet
Cap. Mug. Tee. These read fine in a collection grid, where the photograph carries the meaning and the surrounding products supply the context. Pulled out of that grid and dropped into a feed, the title is doing all the work alone, and a product called Cap is competing against every cap that has ever been manufactured.
The fix is to add the attribute that makes it a specific thing rather than a category: the material, the model, the format, the intended use. Not keywords, and not every keyword you can think of, which is the failure mode at the other end of this scale. One defining attribute is usually enough to move a title from a category noun to an identifiable product.
How to check it yourself
- Sort titles by length and look at the shortest.
- Add the defining attribute: material, model, format or intended use.
The fix
Extend the title with the defining attribute, for example the material, model or format.
How Endcap handles this
Endcap finds and groups every product with this problem and links each finding to the Shopify document behind it, but it does not write this one for you. Across the catalogs we scanned this affected 6.9% of products, which is the kind of number that is tedious by hand and quick in bulk.
The fix touches a field we deliberately do not automate. Endcap only ever writes vendor, product type and description, because those are the three where a wrong value is visible and reversible. Prices, identifiers, publication state and status are decisions with consequences a tool should not be making on your behalf.
Common questions
My titles look fine in my collection pages.
They do, because the photograph and the surrounding products carry the context. Pulled out of that grid and into a feed, the title is working alone, and a product called Cap is competing with every cap ever made.
What should I add?
One defining attribute, not a list. The material, the model, the format or the intended use is usually enough to move a title from a category noun to an identifiable product.
Source: Shopify documentation
Check your own store
Enter your Shopify URL and see whether the public products we can inspect show these problems. No install required for the first scan.