Shopify and fashion retailer
Fit questions on a store where the sizes are a dropdown
A fashion catalogue on Shopify publishes almost everything a shopper needs and almost none of it as text. The size run is a set of option values, the measurements sit behind a click, and the fit note that would settle the question was never written down anywhere. The install takes two minutes. Making the material answerable is the actual job, and it is a writing job rather than a configuration one.
Why this pairing is its own job
The Shopify install guide covers the tag, and the fashion retailer guide covers what the assistant has to know. What follows is the part that belongs to neither.
- A Shopify product page renders its variants as a control. A crawler reads the title, the description body and the price, and gets the size run as option values: 8, 10, 12. The word chest never appears on that page with a number after it, so nothing the assistant reads can answer the question the whole catalogue turns on.
- The size guide almost always arrives after a click. Whether it comes from an app, from a metafield the theme paints into a tab, or from a link that opens a lightbox, it was not in the page a crawler was served. When it is a picture of a table, which it usually is, there is no text in it at all.
- Fit notes belong at the level of a block or a line rather than an item, and Shopify already has somewhere for that: the collection description. It is the one piece of writing on a fashion store that survives a season, and on most stores it is a single sentence long.
- Shopify writes the refund policy for you, so the sale exclusion is published at a real address from day one, while the carve out for faulty goods that has to sit beside it is not written anywhere.
What changes about the install here
<script src="https://cdn.askably.xyz/w.js" data-key="pk_live_YOUR_KEY" defer></script>The tag is the same one on the Shopify guide. Everything below is about where it goes on a fashion retailer site specifically.
Fashion stores change themes more often than other shops
A theme edit belongs to the theme it was made in, and this is the trade that swaps themes most: a seasonal refresh, a campaign theme published for a sale weekend, an agency rebuild before a launch. Each of those is a chance for the storefront to go live from a copy that never had the tag in it.
Duplicating the live theme carries the tag across, so a copy taken this morning is usually fine. The dangerous ones are the copy taken before you installed and the theme delivered fresh by somebody else. Both look finished, and neither warns you.
Put a check of the storefront source into the list you already run when you publish a theme, next to checking the cart and the payment icons. It costs a minute on the one morning of the year when you least want the shop quietly broken.
Look at a product page on a phone before you look at anything else
Fashion themes put a sticky add to cart bar across the bottom of the viewport on mobile, usually carrying the size selector, and that is the corner the launcher renders in. On the home page there is no bar and nothing looks wrong. On the page where the fit question actually gets asked, two things want the same thumb.
Decide which one wins rather than finding out from a session recording later. Most fashion themes make the sticky bar optional per template, so if you would rather keep the launcher reachable on product pages, that is the setting to change.
Where the answerable material lives
| The size guide as an ordinary page | Not the app modal and not an exported image: a page at its own address with the measurement table typed out as text, and a line above it saying whether the figures are body measurements or the garment measured flat. Those two get confused constantly, and the confusion is the return. |
|---|---|
| Collection descriptions doing real work | The fit note for a line belongs here, because it stays true after the individual items have gone. Which blocks run small, which are cut oversized, which sit high on the waist, which shrink slightly. One honest paragraph per collection outlasts a season of product copy. |
| Model height and the size worn, as a sentence | In the description body, where it is part of the page, rather than in an app field the theme renders separately. Shoppers reason by comparison, and one line giving the height and the size on the model settles more fit questions than the measurement table does. |
| The generated refund policy, rewritten | Shopify publishes it at a fixed address, so it will be found and it will be cited. Add the sale and final sale exclusions to it, and add the sentence saying an exclusion for changing your mind does not touch a claim about faulty goods, in the same document, so the assistant repeats both halves together. |
The first thing to get right
Publish the size guide as a normal page with the measurements as text, recrawl, then ask the assistant for the chest measurement on a medium and read the citation that comes back with it.
It is the shortest path from an assistant that deflects fit questions to one that answers them, and the citation tells you straight away whether it found your table or something else with numbers in it. Everything else on this list is worth less until that one question returns with the right source underneath it.
The failure that belongs to this combination
It cites a size chart, and it is the wrong chart
Most fashion stores carry more than one. Womenswear and menswear, a footwear conversion table, a kids range, a brand that supplied its own. They have similar headings, similar numbers and similar page titles, which is exactly the condition under which the nearest match is not the right match.
The symptom is quiet, because the answer looks correct. A confident table of measurements arrives with a citation attached and the customer orders from it. Nothing in the reply signals that the numbers came off the men's chart.
The defence is on your side of it. Give each chart a title that says who it is for in words rather than in a code, put the range name in the first line of the page body, and read the citations on your own test questions before you read the answers. Then raise the refusal threshold so a weak match declines instead of reaching for the closest set of numbers.
Before you go live
- The origin the page is served from has to be on the allowlist for that assistant, or nothing renders and the browser console says which origin was refused. An apex domain and its www are two different origins to a browser, so list both, along with any staging or preview host you want it to work on.
- Open the site as a visitor would, on the pages a fashion retailer visitor actually lands on, and ask it something only your own material could answer. A widget that renders is not the same as a widget that has read anything.
Questions
- Our size chart comes from an app. Will it get read?
- Usually not. If the table arrives when a shopper clicks, it was not in the page that was crawled, and if it arrives as an image there is nothing in it to read. The app can stay for shoppers. The assistant needs a plain page carrying the same numbers.
- Do we need every product indexed?
- No, and it works against you. A fashion catalogue turns over several times a year, so item level material starts going stale the day it is crawled, and an assistant describing last season's coat in the present tense reads as carelessness. Index the durable layer: the size guide, the fit notes, the fabric and care glossary, the returns terms.
- Somebody asks whether size 12 is coming back. What happens?
- It should say it cannot check stock and take the enquiry. The reason is worth knowing: a crawl is a snapshot, so a product page captured while a size was available keeps reading as available long after it has gone. An assistant that confidently repeats a sold out size is worse than one admitting it cannot see the shelf.
Keep reading
- Installing on ShopifyPaste one script tag into theme.liquid, list both store origins, and know why the widget cannot appear on the Shopify checkout.
- Everything for a fashion retailerFit is both the most asked pre-purchase question and the biggest cause of returns. Here is what a clothing retailer can safely automate.
- A pharmacy on Shopify, and the range the assistant must never readEvery product is a public page a crawl can reach, so a pharmacy store puts its whole medicines range into the corpus by default. Undo that before you index.
- Selling bikes on one origin and booking the workshop on anotherThe bikes sell on Shopify and the workshop books somewhere else. Two origins, a geometry chart that is an image, and frame sizes as options.
- The launcher on the one page that makes it look omniscientThe launcher appears on My Account, where the customer can see their order and the assistant cannot. Returns live behind that same login.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.