Client is telling me custom collection sorting is impossible and I am not sure if they are right

Retired Boards Appdev Extensions
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Topic summary

A developer is building a custom app to automatically sort products within Shopify collections based on three priority tiers: new products with specific tags first, regular products second, and sale items last. The client manages over 20,000 products across collections containing 10,000+ items each, currently requiring manual reordering whenever new products are added.

The developer plans to use Shopify’s Admin API (collectionReorderProducts mutation) and bulk operations to query and reorder products programmatically. However, they’re uncertain whether this approach is viable, as the client reports that multiple agencies claimed it’s impossible, and existing collection sorting apps don’t meet the specific requirements.

The main technical concern is efficiently handling large product volumes, particularly since the API doesn’t allow filtering by active/draft status. The discussion remains open regarding whether this is technically unfeasible or simply complex and resource-intensive to implement.

One response promotes a third-party app (SortWise) as a potential solution for advanced sorting needs, though it’s unclear if this addresses the specific three-tier sorting requirement.

Summarized with AI on October 23. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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So I am new to Shopify development and this is the first project I am taking on. The client wants the products in the collections to be ordered like so

New products that have a specific tag 
Products that are neither new or on sale 
Products on sale

So I tried doing this with Liquid as they were displayed to the client and found out pretty quickly that wasn’t a good solution. Then I started looking into the Admin API specifically collectionReorderProducts. I can query products by collection ID and sort them and then use collectionReorderProducts. I have the app already setup that can be installed through a link that gives the app the access token required to use the Admin API. My only concern is there are over 10,000 products in some collections and I see you cant filter Collection.products by active and draft status which sucks. I saw that you can use bulk operations to make this a little more efficient so I may do that.

The client said they reached out to a couple different agencies that told her this couldn’t be done. I don’t know if it really cant be done or its just a big hassle and would be expensive and time consuming to develop and test. I have seen a few apps that claim to do collection sorting but the client said they have tried them already and they don’t do what she needs them to do. So I am here asking people more experienced if this is something to pursue or not. Right now she is basically hiring someone full time to baby sit the collections and manually one by one place these on the admin page. Every time a new batch of products get uploaded it needs to be done again and there are over 20k products. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Hey there! I realize this question is a bit old, but for anyone else finding this thread with advanced sorting needs: we actually built the SortWise app to handle exactly this (and more). It is a perfect solution for any store with advanced sorting needs!