Hi everyone,
Thank you for all of the feedback! I've also created a Collect API Feedback Form to collect any additional feedback you may have on the Collect API in general, since we have an opportunity to address some of it when we release an alternative solution.
I've tried to address most of your questions below.
How about custom collections? Are you going to add the same endpoint for them?
There isn't currently a plan to add a /custom_collection/{id}/products endpoint. Can you tell me what you'd like to use it for, and what problem you're trying to solve that our existing APIs don't work well for? We do have /products.json?collection_id=12346.
1- Is the array returned by the new smart_collection/products endpoint already sorted correctly? This is not stated in the documentation (at least not how I read it), and I cannot see a "sort_position" attribute on the objects.
Yes. It is sorted by the default sort order that is used for displaying products in a smart collection on storefront. We'd love to get away from exposing a "position" field in any new APIs, which requires us to do non-performant updates to keep these in sync, even when they aren't required for querying products in an accurate sort order.
2- Can we use this endpoint now? You say it's being rolled out from Mid October (next week), so want to be sure I can update now and be ready for it ahead of time.
We've been planning to expose /smart_collection/{id}/products only for shops that have this new feature enabled, which would require you to know when the feature is enabled as mentioned above.
The endpoint will be available mid-October, at which point you can start testing on your partner shop if you have the Manual Sort feature enabled, which can be requested by contacting deprecations@shopify.com. We won't enable this feature on merchant shops until a bit later.
Do you always do a GET on the smart collection prior to using that endpoint?
I've been debating adding a field to smart collections so that API clients can know, without querying products, whether a collection uses the feature, and also whether it has manually sorted products. Say "manually_sorted_products" : true if there are some, false if not, and that field would not be present if the new feature isn't enabled on that shop. I still have to determine whether we can do that in a performant way, but would that work?
If that isn't ideal, since you don't currently do a GET, I can look to see if there is a meaningful way to ensure this endpoint works on shops that don't have the feature enabled. Keep an eye on announcements for the final version of the API.
1) Since the manual sort_order is going away, what will you set the collection sort order to for Smart Collections that are currently set to "manual"?
The products which are no longer manually sorted will be sorted according to "best selling" sort order. For collections with fewer than 250 products, all of their products will be manually sorted but the automatic sort order for that collection will default to "best selling".
2) Will manually sorted products always show at the top of every collection page or only if no sort_order is specified (such as by the Sort By drop down)? If it is always, that would make changing the collection sort order seem like it doesn't work if up to the first 250 products never change.
Yes, they always show at the top. And yes, changing the sort order won't have any impact if all products in the smart collection are manually sorted. however, any number of these can be removed from being manually sorted. You can choose to have no manually sorted products in a smart collection.
3) Will merchants have an easy way to disable or clear the manually sorted products for Smart Collections in the Shopify Admin?
Yes! They will be able to remove them all very easily.
Dominique
Shopify Discussion
