Shopify product type and vendor: what they are for and why empty ones hurt
Last updated: 31 July 2026
Product type and vendor are two of Shopify's oldest organisational fields, and two of the most frequently left blank. Neither is required to save a product, and neither is visible to shoppers by default — which is precisely why they rot.
What each field is for
- Vendor: who makes or supplies the product. On a multi-brand store this is the brand; on a single-brand store it is usually your own name, and that is fine — consistent is what matters.
- Product type: what the product is. One value per product, describing the item itself — "Mug", "Throw Blanket" — not a marketing category like "Gifts Under 25".
Tags and collections handle merchandising groupings. Type should stay a plain description of the thing, because that is what automated collections and reporting key on.
What empty fields break
- Automated collections. A collection with the condition "product type equals Mug" silently excludes every mug with an empty type. The collection looks like it works — it is just quietly short.
- Storefront filters. Theme filters built on vendor or type drop products that lack the value, so shoppers filtering by brand never see them.
- Reporting. Sales by vendor or by type lumps everything blank into one meaningless bucket.
- Feeds. Google Shopping and similar feeds map these fields; missing values can weaken or reject a listing.
The pattern is consistent: nothing errors, the product just falls out of things it should be part of. That is what makes these fields worth auditing rather than eyeballing.
How Catamend handles it
Two rules cover this — missing_product_type and missing_product_vendor — and both are fixable. The fix uses values already present elsewhere in your catalog rather than inventing new ones, so it does not fragment your taxonomy into near-duplicates.
As always the fix only writes where the field is empty, so a deliberate value is never overwritten, and each change is recorded with its before and after.
Before bulk-filling these, settle on your vocabulary. Filling 2,000 products with slightly inconsistent types is harder to undo than leaving them blank.
Check your own catalog
Catamend scans every product and variant against 23 checks like this one, ranks what it finds by impact, and applies the safe fixes in one click with a full before-and-after history. Install Catamend from the Shopify App Store.