Glossary
Shopify product vendor
Definition
In Shopify, the vendor is the brand or manufacturer of a product, set in the product's Vendor field. Shopify uses it for filtering and for vendor-based automatic collections, but it does not create a customer-facing "shop by brand" page on its own. A brand-page app turns your vendors into a browsable directory.
What the vendor field is for
The vendor field labels who makes or supplies a product. Behind the scenes you can filter by vendor in the admin and build automatic collections that group all products from one vendor, which is useful for organisation and reporting.
What it does not do is give shoppers a single page to browse your brands. Shopify has the data but not the storefront page, so multi-brand stores often build one by hand.
Turning vendors into a shop-by-brand page
The manual approach is to create one collection per vendor and link them together, which is a lot of upkeep. The alternative is an app that reads the vendors already on your products and renders a searchable A-Z directory automatically.
See how to add a shop-by-brand page to Shopify for both approaches.
See also