How do you embed products in Shopify blog posts when you have hundreds of products and thousands of photos?
Below are four options but scalability is a problem, and I'd like to know what people with large catalogs do.
(For some background, the problem shows up around 40-50 products. At 4-5 photos each that's already 250 images to pick from, and every post means choosing which products fit, finding photos that match, writing alt text, adding links. It's the slowest part of writing a post, so it's the part that gets dropped - which is how you end up with blogs without products, images or links.)
1. By hand: Fine for the first few posts. Then you stop doing it.
2. Buy Button channel: Free, and the price stays current because it loads live, which is nice. But you still pick every product yourself, and the embed is JavaScript - so it's not in the page text. Google may render it. The AI crawlers don't run JS, so as far as ChatGPT or Perplexity are concerned those products aren't on the page at all.
3. Theme work: Developer adds a product block to the article template. Haven't done this myself. but from what I can tell it scales the rendering but not the choosing, and the products sit in one block under the article rather than between paragraphs.
4. An app that reads your catalog: Some embed cards, some write the post and place products for you. Disclosure: I build one of the second kind. The honest downside is it's only as good as your product data - thin titles and descriptions and you get generic placements - and if you publish twice a month, by hand is cheaper and better. Worth checking if any of the apps put put real links and images into the page HTML or load them with a script.
So, anyone with a few hundred products - how long does one post take you?