Shopify rebuilt its Collections tool to give merchants more granular control over which products are listed. In the old days (last week LOL), you could only “Include” items based on their product type, tag, status, and other properties. Now, you can also “Exclude” items based on their properties. The small difference is huge for merchants.
For example, imagine if you wanted to create a Collection for a specific promotion that offered 50% off items that weren’t currently on sale (ie: not slashed down in price), but you also didn’t want to include your Kits or Bundles in the promotion. In the old days, you’d have to sacrifice your firstborn to make something like that happen. Well, more realistically, you’d have to create a Tag for all your non-Bundle items so that your final collection could “Include items not on sale AND items tagged Not Bundle.” A workaround or a third-party app was always required, and it was so damn frustrating!
Now, with the new Collection interface, you can easily set two different parameters to “Include Items Not On Sale” and “Exclude Product Type equals Bundles” — or whatever your particular use case may be.
In addition to the ability to Exclude items from Collections, Shopify opened up the ability to use multiple sources, target specific variants, connect to apps and external workflows, and hand-pick items alongside your automation rules. The ability to pull sources from apps, not just your product catalog, is an especially big feature. You can now, for example, rely on apps to track bestsellers or trending products and feed that data into your Collection to populate it with products, instead of having to do it manually.
The new Collections API technically rolled out in June, so you might have seen developers talking about it during the past month, but Shopify just now launched the merchant-facing admin experience.
Do you want to know the one thing you STILL can’t do though?
Include or Exclude items based on their Stock Levels from ONE particular fulfillment location! Here’s a problem that’s been happening for years on Shopify (and is still happening after the Collection overhaul):
- Merchant sets the Collection to only display if an item is in stock.
- However, the Collection still displays items and shows them as “OUT OF STOCK” — why?
- The reason: Your store may only fulfill online orders from ONE fulfillment location, but if a Shopify Collection sees inventory in ANY of your fulfillment locations, it’ll still show the item in the Collection, albeit marked as “OUT OF STOCK”.
- The situation happens a lot, for example, if a merchant keeps dedicated inventory for sale through their brick-and-mortar store, pop-up locations, or for influencer gifting. Even though the primary Online Warehouse shows “0” units (and should thus be considered OUT OF STOCK and not appear in the Collection), Shopify still counts the other inventory units that are not sellable online as “In Stock” and shows the item.
- Shopify, please fix this! All it takes is one simple condition: “If fulfillment location equals ________.”
Overall, the new Collection interface offers a huge win for Shopify merchants, and I’m grateful for it. Now I just also need that fulfillment location filtering feature above. I’ll never be happy…
