Why can't I manually sort all collections?

[twitchfish]

I want to reorder all collection items on my front end shop/collections page which is https://twitchfish.com/collections.  By default the list is alphabetical.  Seems like this should be a straightforward change of sorting in admin but I can't figure it out.  Everything I am finding points to this article that says I can manually sort my collection list.  But I don't have the option to manually sort.  Below is what I see in admin. Am I missing something? I'm using Debut.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/collections/collection-layout#change-the-sort-order-for-...

[Elias · Accepted solution]

Hey, @twitchfish.

Elias here with Shopify Support. Thank you for reaching out.

You can change the sort order for your products in a collection, as our guide suggests, by creating a separate collection containing all your products - this allows you to sort the order of the products in the collection as opposed to using the default selection for All Products in your navigation menus. However, the solution from this guide doesn't apply to collections, as this only applies to sorting products.

Here's a screenshot of the sorting function from my test store:

Alternatively, you can create a separate page for your collections using Pages and include your collections in a manually sorted order with this page. This way, you can add the images for your collections and link each of the images to the collections. You can also use the tables to create a grid layout for your images, which can help with aligning your collection images. After that, you can change the link in your menu to this page.

I'd love to know if this workaround works for you. Let me know!

[twitchfish]

Thank you Elias. I'll give this a shot and let you know.

[Madskilladil]

It’s a good workaround, so basically the onus is on the store owner to create a page and add thumbnails linking to the individual collections. I still think you should add an option to arrange the collections manually, as this is creating extra and unnecessary work for the store owner.  Kind Regards.

[greenvalleycode]

I really can't believe @Shopify has not made this option available by default by now. It's very annoying to go through all of my collection pages and add a small change in order to reorder them every time I need to edit a collection. 

[Elias]

Greetings, @greenvalleycode.

Thank you for joining thread!

Since you can change the order of your collections, then I think you may be looking for a way to make these types of changes in bulk - to multiple collections at once. Is this correct?

It does make sense that some collections may contain some of the same products and you may want to replicate the sorting order, or you simply want all of your collections to be sorted in the same (eg. alphabetical, prices, etc.). However, there isn't many use-cases where one would need to apply a bulk change to multiple collections, as most collections carry different products. Also, if you're using one of the sorting presets, then you wouldn't need to keep changing the order after adding new products. Nevertheless, if you have a specific use-case scenario that you can share with me, then I'd be happy to submit a feature request on your behalf to our development team.

Can you share more details about your collections? How are your collections categorized and sorted at the moment?