Has anyone had all of their products delete out of their manual collections recently?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner experienced an unexpected issue where all products were removed from their manual collections, despite these collections functioning normally since 2018.

The store uses primarily Smart collections, but maintains several manual collections for seasonal products and specialty items where manual addition is more efficient than tag-based automation.

The deletion has caused significant problems:

  • Broken pages across the site
  • Customer confusion about product/brand availability
  • Unplanned time investment to restore collections

The user is seeking to identify the root cause, questioning whether a recent Shopify update may have triggered the issue. The problem remains unresolved, and they face the prospect of manually rebuilding all affected collections.

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

We have used manual collections on our website since launching it in 2018. Most of our collections are Smart collections, but there are quite a few manual due to seasonal products or specialty items that it’s just faster to manually add them than set up the tags, etc to create a Smart collection.

Recently all of my manual collections deleted the product out of them. I can’t figure out why, but it has broken quite a few pages on my site and I’ve had clients think we no longer have the brand available. I can go back and redo it all, but ultimately it’s frustrating and taking time I didn’t alot for this month to manage the site. What could have been the cause? Could it have been the recent update?