How to sort latest active products first, not by data entry order?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A Shopify store is struggling with product sorting in their “new arrivals” collection. Products are currently ordered by data entry date rather than when they become active/published, causing newly launched items to appear on later pages instead of first.

Proposed Solutions:

  • Change collection sort to “Manual” and manually reorder products to prioritize newly active items
  • Duplicate products and delete the originals to reset their creation date

Resolution:
The original poster accepted the manual sorting workaround and will implement it going forward. This appears to be a limitation of Shopify’s default sorting options, which don’t natively support sorting by “publish date” or “active date.”

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

We have staff data entering in all our products to receive in advance and the products have differing launch times.

Our problem is, we need our products to sit ‘new to old’ from when they are made active, not in the order they were entered into Shopify.

I have products that have launched (made active) later than others, but were entered in the system earlier, so even though they are newly released, they sit in our new arrivals collection on page 3 or 4 instead of page 1 (sorting new to old) and customers cannot see the newly arrived products straight away.

Is there a work around to this incorrect order of sorting products and how they show up on the website?

2

Hi @Mandy_Bell1 Hope you are doing well
One way you can do this by changing the sort in the collection to manually and then take the product to the top which you want to show first. Thanks.

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3

Thank you! Will do that from now on!! :folded_hands:t3:

4

What we do , we do duplicate the product and delete the previous one and it comes up as a new :slightly_smiling_face: