building your product hierarchy

You can get a lot of insight from Portfolytics without touching your product structure – but if you want to see how different categories or subcategories perform, building a product hierarchy is the way to go.

It takes just a few tags or tweaks to get started.

What is a product hierarchy

A hierarchy is how you group your products into main categories and subcategories. Shopify doesn’t have this built in, but Portfolytics gives you a way to analyze it anyway without coding or other apps!

Example:

• main category: Women
• subcategory: Dresses

You’ll be able to see how each group performs and even drill into individual products from the same view.

Note that organizing the hierarchy in the Shopify store for your clients can be done in many ways. Here is a detailed article from Shopify in case you are interested.

How to set it up

Portfolytics lets you use either Tags or Product Types for both levels. It’s flexible – you decide what works for your store.

Some common setups:

• Tag: main_cat:men, Product Type: “T-shirts”
• Product Type: “Shoes”, Tag: sub_cat:sneakers
• Tag: main_cat:accessories, Tag: sub_cat:scarves

There’s no wrong way, as long as you’re consistent. We recommend using a tag prefix like main_cat: or sub_cat: to keep things organized.

Where to go in the app

Now that your product hierarchy is set up click “Hierarchy” in the top menu.

Here’s what happens:

• On the top you can see some KPIs for a quick overview
• Select a main category in the graph
• You’ll see related subcategories with their sales and average order value
• Click on a subcategory and the product table on the bottom updates automatically
• You can click on another main or subcategory to analyze them

It’s a quick way to go from high-level insights to specific product performance.

Why this matters

Most stores have lots of products. But if you don’t group them, it’s hard to know what’s working.

Creating a hierarchy means:

• You can find best- and worst-performing categories fast
• You can spot where you might be missing products
• You can clean up product groups that aren’t selling

This takes only a few minutes to set up and works automatically once in place.