For Shopify sellers, dealing with hundreds of downloadable PDFs like product manuals could be a big time suck; they take you away from working on things that actually generate revenue. Yet, handling and sharing them properly is an important part of customer experience.
Without these product manuals PDF and other support files, customers would not be able to figure out and use their products.
If you are looking for ways to simplify the process of sharing PDF files on Shopify – without complicating things with external storage like Dropbox or Google Drive – you can actually just take advantage of Shopify’s storage, which you already have access to.
Here is how:
Step 1 – Upload your files to Shopify
Log on to your Shopify admin; go to Content > Files.
From here you can directly upload your files into Shopify storage. It is that easy!
A few things to note:
- The maximum file size allowed for image is 20MB, and for video it is 1GB.
- There is no maximum file size for PDF, but for the sake of loading speed, do consider compressing it with a PDF compressor (example).
- You can upload any file, visit this page for Shopify’s file size limit and storage limitation.
For each file uploaded to Shopify, there is a file URL with an URL structure like https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/…
Step 2 – Create a page to list your file URLs
Go to Sales Channel > Online Store, and create a page.
Consider naming the page something like Resource Center, Download Center, PDF Library etc.
From here, you can manually list out the files and hyperlink them to the corresponding Shopify file URLs.
If you have a lot of files and need a more professional way to display and manage them, you can also manage with the File Search Bar & Library MP app. The app lets you list your files in a widget that you can embed in your page, and provides extra functionalities. Here is a comparison on whether you should list the files manually or via the app:
| List files manually | List files using File Search Bar & Library MP app | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Less than 20 files | More than 20 files, the app supports unlimited files. |
| File storage | Shopify storage | Shopify storage |
| How customers discover files | Scrolling | – File keyword search – Browsing file category – Scrolling |
| How admin manage files | Manually list files using page text editor | Via app interface. – Admin can create multiple categories, renamed files and easily rearrange their display order |
Step 3 – List and share your download page
Now that your PDF download page is ready, remember to add it to your Shopify navigation menu and in customer support related section, so your customers would know where to find the PDF files they need.