Smarter Collections

Shopify has two collection types, custom and smart, where custom collections are manually populated and smart collections are populated using rules.

Smart collections are incredibly useful, however they have a limitation of only allowing AND style filters. For example Product Type = X AND Price > 50. You cannot specify Product Type = X OR Product Type = Y.

This is where Power Tools Smarter Collections can help.

Note: Shopify has now added support for OR style queries. If you require NOT functionality, or to aggregate collections then Smarter Collections are still very useful.

Overview

Smarter Collections allow you join different collections together, as well as exclude other collection to create the product list.

Creating a Smarter Collection

To create a Smarter Collection go the View All collections menu item, then press New Collection. Selected 'Smarter' for the collection type.

Converting an existing collection

If you already have a collection with the correct title and handle you can convert it into a Smarter Collection.

Go the View All collections menu item, find the collection and click on the type. This will bring up the convert collection menu.

Select 'Smarter' and press Update. This will queue a job to convert the collection. Once the job is done you will need to edit the products.

Editing the products

Go to View All in the collections menu, find the collection, and then press Edit Products. You can now select the collections to include and exclude. Press save when you are done and the collection will update.

Simple Example

As an example if you wanted to create the collection listed above you could using the following.

Product Type = X OR Product Type = Y

Firstly you would need a collection of Product Type = X, and another of Product Type = Y.

Once you have both of these collections you can create a new collection in Power Tools, or even convert an existing collection.

Pressing the Edit Products button on the Power Tool collection list for you collection will display the edit Smarter Collection page.

From here you can select your two collections to join. Press save and your done.

Excluding Products

Smart Collections also allow you to exclude products based on a collection.

Taking the example above, we may want to exclude any products that are over $100.

Firstly create a new Smart Collection called Over $100, with the criteria of Price > 100.

Go to the Smart Collection by clicking on the Edit Products link on the collection in Power Tools.

Add the Over $100 collection to the list of excluded. Press save and your collection will update.

Tips

It may seem like a bit of work to create these extra collections, however you can avoid much of this by using the Easy Collections feature to create collections for each product type and vendor.