How to Create Collections in Shopify
- Shopify merged manual and automated collections on July 16, 2026. One collection can now combine conditions, hand-picked products, exclusions, other collections, and specific variants.
- A single collection caps at 60 conditions, and a store can hold up to 5,000 automated collections plus a soft limit of about 100,000 manual ones.
- Collections holding more than 5,000 products stop showing storefront filters entirely, which is the number that should decide when you split a category.
- Shopify's Search & Discovery app caps you at 25 filters per store, and that cap is the decider between what deserves its own collection versus a filter.
- Filtered and sorted collection URLs canonicalize back to the base collection, so a filter combination will never rank on its own no matter how much demand it has.
- Shopify auto-generates crawlable pages at /collections/types?q= and /collections/vendors?q= that most store owners have never seen.
To create a collection in Shopify, go to Products > Collections > Create collection, give it a title and description, then decide how it gets populated with products.
Some cool news in the Shopify world: as of July 16, 2026 a single collection can pull from several sources at once: automated conditions, hand-picked products, exclusions, and even other collections. This is way more granular control than we had with the binary Automated or Manual collections previously.
Note that one collection still caps at 60 conditions, and a store can hold up to 5,000 automated collections.
Collections are the pages that your navigation, mega menu, homepage carousels, bundle apps, and half your marketing links all point at, so they're worth thinking about carefully.
This guide covers the setup, what changed in 2026, how to decide which collections you need, the metafield work that makes collection pages worth ranking, and the URL behavior that eats crawl budget like I eat White Cheddar Cheez Its.
Collections vs. Product Category, Product Type, Tags, and Metafields
A collection is the only one of Shopify's organization tools that gets a fully merchandisable page: its own URL, description, image, custom template, and spot in your navigation.
Product category, product type, tags, and metafields are categorization inputs that feed collections.
| Tool | How many per product | What it is | Customer-facing page? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collection | Unlimited | A merchandised group of products with a URL, description, and image | Yes, at /collections/handle |
| Product category | One | A fixed entry from Shopify's Standard Product Taxonomy; drives tax rates, sales channel requirements, and category attributes | No |
| Product type | One | A custom text field you define for your own store | Only via auto-generated /collections/types?q= pages |
| Tags | Many | Free-text labels, good for attributes and campaigns | Only via /collections/handle/tag URLs |
| Metafields | Many | Typed, structured data (text, number, true/false, rating, reference) | No, but they power filters and conditions |
The Product category attribute unlocks structured data that most stores never use. Assigning a product to "Shirts" in Shopify's Standard Product Taxonomy makes category metafields available (like size, neckline, and sleeve length), already available as filter sources and collection conditions.
Custom product types still exist in 2026, despite a handful of guides claiming Shopify removed them. Shopify's own documentation says that if your product's category doesn't match an existing one, you can enter a custom option under Product Type, so both fields coexist and do different jobs.
Give tags a naming convention on day one, because you can't rename a tag across products without a bulk edit. I use a prefix pattern like fit:relaxed, season:aw26, promo:blackfriday. It keeps a long tag list readable and makes automated conditions trivial to write. Anything with a fixed set of values (material, sleeve length, capacity) belongs in a metafield instead, since metafields are typed and validated where tags are free text.
How to Create a Collection in Shopify, Step by Step
These are the six steps to create a Collection in Shopify you'll want to follow to make sure you're following best practices and maximizing SEO juice.
Go to Products > Collections > Create collection
Collections live under Products in the left-hand admin nav. The Create collection button sits top right.
Write a title people would search for
Name it "Beach Vacation Essentials" over "The Bondi Bundle". The title becomes the H1 and, by default, the page title, so a clever name costs clarity, which will ding your position in search results. Save the personality for the collection description and the imagery.
Write 100 to 150 words of description
The description field is the only unique copy most collection pages get. So, keep keywords in mind here.
Choose how products get populated
Add automated conditions, hand-pick products, or combine both. Conditions can match all or any, and category, tag, type, and vendor conditions also support exclusions.
Set the sort order deliberately
Shopify offers Manually, Best selling, Product title, Price, Date created, and Most relevant, which was added on April 15, 2026. When in doubt, Best selling is a winner.
Add the image, edit the search listing, then publish
Upload a collection image, edit the search engine listing so the page title and meta description read like a search result, publish to your sales channels, then add it to a menu or a homepage section.
When you edit a collection's URL handle, Shopify shows a checkbox offering to create a 301 redirect from the old URL. Leave it ticked. Unticking it is the single most common way I see stores lose rankings on a page that was working, and the damage doesn't show up in analytics for weeks.
Featuring a collection on the storefront happens in Online Store > Edit Theme, where a Featured Collection section displays products from a specific collection and a Collection List section displays several collection tiles side by side. Collection List is how you build the "shop by category" row that belongs on a high-converting Shopify home page.
What Changed in July 2026: Collections Now Have Multiple Sources
Shopify replaced the manual-versus-automated split with a single flexible collection model on July 16, 2026.
Every collection is now built from one or more sources, and a single source can mix typed conditions, manually included products, manual exclusions, and exclusions by collection at the same time.
Four capabilities came out of this (awesome) change, all of which are saying "byeee" to workarounds store owners have been living with for years:
- Mixed sources. A June Sale collection can auto-include everything with a sale price, exclude the bestsellers you don't want discounted, and drop a few low-stock items by hand, all in one collection.
- Variant-level collections. Collections can target specific variants rather than whole products, so a "Travel Essentials" can contain only the travel-size variants of products that also come in other sizes.
- Nested collections. A collection can use other collections as sources, so an Activewear collection built from Leggings, Sports Bras, and Tanks updates itself whenever any of those three changes.
- App sources. Apps can supply a product source to a collection, which is how live merchandising data (stock velocity, personalization, recommendations) find their way into a collection without an app duplicating your catalog.
The old rule that you could never convert a manual collection into an automated one is over (thank goodness).
The change used to mean rebuilding the collection under a temporary handle, copying the description and imagery across, then swapping the handles back, which was a tedious job on a store with dozens of collections.
How to Decide Which Collections Your Store Needs
Here's rule of thumb I use on every build: make it a collection when people search for it by name, and make it a filter when people only narrow by it after they arrive. "Linen dresses" gets searched, so it earns a URL and a description. "Size 8" gets filtered, so it earns a checkbox in the filtering area.
Most merchants don't even come close to the 25-filter cap, but for stores with really large catalogs, that cap forces you to prioritize your product attributes.
Once you've spent filters on size, color, price, availability, and material, you have twenty left for a store that might have sixty candidate attributes, and everything that doesn't make the cut either needs to become a collection or become invisible.
Every collection I build does one of three jobs, and knowing which job a collection is doing tells you how much effort it deserves.
| Job | What it's for | Example | How I build it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navigation | The permanent shelves of the store; these go in the main menu and need to rank | Dresses, Skincare, Lighting | Automated on category or product type, full description, custom template |
| Merchandising | Seasonal and campaign pages; temporary, high-effort, often linked from email and ads | Summer Sale, Gifts Under $50, New In | Conditions plus hand-picked hero products and exclusions |
| Plumbing | Collections nothing links to, built to feed specific situations like apps | Bundle Eligible, Upsell Pool | Automated, no description, unpublished from search where possible |
Plumbing collections are where sprawl starts.
Every bundle builder, upsell app, product option app, and discount rule wants a collection to point at, so a store with eight apps ends up building twenty collections nobody really planned for.
Name them with a shared prefix like sys- so they group together and you can tell in one glance which collections are running things under the hood.
Seriously consider writing 150 words per non-plumbing collection you create. A collection page with a grid and no copy competes in search results against category pages that have buying guides, size advice, and internal links.
Depth has a hard limit on Shopify too. Menus support a top-level item plus two levels of nested dropdowns, with up to 10,000 items per menu and 1,000 menus per store. So, a mega menu can be very wide, but it can't go four levels deep.
Plan your category tree with that two levels of nesting max in mind. A structure that needs three is a structure your customers will experience friction with, and navigation confusion is a common reason stores get traffic but no sales.
Split a collection before it reaches 5,000 products, because once you go above that number, collections stop displaying filters altogether (rude!).
On a large catalog that's the difference between a browsable department store and an unusable wall of product. Stores chasing their first $100k year rarely hit it, but catalogs that grow through wholesale or dropshipping get there faster than expected.
Using Metafields to Make Collection Pages Worth Ranking
Metafields are super duper powerful on Shopify, and they're not just for Products and Pages.
Collection metafields let you add structured content to a collection beyond the single description field, allowing you to use just one main collection template while having dynamic, varying content on it.
Think of things like per-collection FAQs, a hero video, a "how to choose" block, and a care-instructions panel, each as its own typed field in the Collection backend.
You can set these Metafields up in Settings > Custom data > Collections, then fill in the Metafield values per collection, then connect them in the theme editor using the Insert dynamic source button next to any matching setting.
There's no code required for the basic version, which means your client can update the buying guide on the Rugs collection without touching a code file.
Metaobjects take things a step farther when it comes to saving time. They handle the chunk of content you'd otherwise copy and paste into thirty collection Metafields.
They pretty much group a set of Metafield values that always appear together (think an "About the Artist" section that has their name, location, and an image). You can then attach this metaobject to a collection to populate multiple metafields at once. If you ever need to update the source info, every collection that points to this Metaobject auto-updates (such a timesaver).
Collection URLs and What Shopify Does With Them by Default
Shopify generates a lot of collection URLs you never created, and knowing which ones get indexed changes how you plan your category structure.
| URL pattern | What it is | Canonical points to | Crawlable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| /collections/dresses | The collection page | Itself | Yes |
| /collections/dresses?page=2 | Pagination | Itself, including ?page=2 | Yes, each page indexes separately |
| /collections/dresses?sort_by=price-ascending | Sorted view | /collections/dresses | No, blocked in robots.txt |
| /collections/dresses?filter.v.price.gte=10 | Single filter applied | /collections/dresses | Yes, single filters aren't blocked |
| /collections/dresses?filter.a&filter.b | Two or more filters | /collections/dresses | No, blocked in robots.txt |
| /collections/dresses/linen | Legacy tag view | /collections/dresses | Yes |
| /collections/dresses/products/x | Product inside a collection | /products/x | Yes, consolidates correctly |
| /collections/types?q=Dress | Auto-generated product type page | Itself | Yes |
| /collections/vendors?q=Brand | Auto-generated vendor page | Itself | Yes |
Important here: filtered collection URLs canonicalize back to the base collection, which means a filter combination will never rank on its own no matter how much search demand there is behind it.
So, any filter that people search for by name needs to become a collection with its own URL and description.
When it comes to auto-generated type and vendor pages, Shopify creates a self-canonical, crawlable page at /collections/types?q= for every product type and /collections/vendors?q= for every vendor in your catalog. Almost no store owner knows those exist.
On a multi-brand store they're free landing pages worth linking to; on a store with sloppy product types they're a pile of thin duplicate pages competing with your real collections.
Open your own store at /collections/types?q= followed by one of your product types, and again at /collections/vendors?q= with a vendor name. If those pages look broken, empty, or duplicate a collection you already built, tidy the underlying product type and vendor fields. Shopify's default robots.txt blocks sorted URLs and multi-filter URLs, but it doesn't block these.
Collection Settings That Break Stores, and How I Set Them Instead
These are the settings I check on every store audit, and they're the ones most likely to be wrong on a store nobody has looked at in a year.
Best selling sorts by the all-time number of orders containing the product, so units sold and recent sales velocity have no effect on it. A product that sold well for three years outranks the one selling out this month, so a "Bestsellers" collection on an older store sometimes starts to becomes an archive of what used to be popular. On collections where recency matters, sort manually or use conditions on a metafield you update, and treat Most relevant (added April 15, 2026) as a newer option worth A/B testing rather than a default.
Every collection needs an image uploaded, because the collection.image object falls back to the featured image of the first product in the collection when you leave it blank. That's how a Sale collection ends up represented by whatever product happens to sort first, and it changes on its own whenever the sort order changes. Most well-built Shopify themes use collection images in their collection list sections, so this shows up on the homepage.
Add "Product status is equal to Active" to any collection you launch products into. Draft products don't render on the storefront by themselves, so the real risk with a big drop is an active product matching a condition before you meant it to go live, and the status condition keeps the collection's membership clean in the admin and in every app reading that collection. Control the launch by flipping product status, rather than by editing conditions under pressure on drop day.
Nav menu link labels don't have to match collection titles 1:1, so consider naming the collection "Beach Vacation Essentials" for search, then label the nav link "Beach" so the menu stays easily readable. You can set the link label in Online Store > Navigation, independently of the collection title.
paginate page size limit from 50 to 250 in June 2025. Empty collections are the last one, and they're the easiest to miss. A seasonal collection whose conditions are no longer pulling in any products stays live at its URL, serving an empty grid to customers and a thin page to Google. So, put a calendar reminder on your campaign collections and unpublish them when the campaign ends.
Wholesale Collections: What Replaced the Old Workaround
The old advice for wholesale on Shopify was a hidden collection plus a secret link sent to your stockists, usually alongside the Shopify Wholesale Channel.
Shopify deprecated that channel on April 30, 2024 and replaced it with B2B on Shopify, which handles product visibility and pricing through catalogs rather than through hidden collections.
Catalogs became available on every paid Shopify plan on April 2, 2026, having been Plus-only before that (yay!).
The base feature set covers company profiles, up to three active B2B catalogs assigned through Markets, volume pricing, quantity rules, payment terms, and vaulted credit cards, while unlimited catalogs and direct catalog assignment to companies stay on Plus.
A catalog controls both which products a specific company can see and what they pay, which a hidden collection never could. FYI: if you're running wholesale through a password-protected page and a spreadsheet of trade prices, that setup is now doing a job the platform does natively, at no extra cost on your existing plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
Start With Your Navigation Collections
Write down the five to eight collections that belong in your main menu, and write 150 words for each before you build anything else. Those are the pages that carry your category rankings, and they're the ones customers use to understand what kind of store this is.
Everything else (the campaigns, the app plumbing, the seasonal edits) gets easier once the permanent shelves are in place.
