List all my products that are not in a collection

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A merchant with thousands of products needs to identify which items haven’t been added to any collection, but Shopify lacks a built-in feature for this.

Current Limitations:

  • No native “products not in collections” filter exists in Shopify admin
  • Product CSV exports don’t include a Collection column
  • No direct collection export functionality available
  • The admin interface shows categories but not collection membership

Suggested Workarounds:

  • Third-party apps: Collection management apps, ETL tools (ez-exporter, Matrixify), or automation apps (Mechanic, Mesa) that can tag or flag products without collections
  • CSV bulk update: Export products to CSV, manually add a Collection column, assign collections to each product, then re-import (labor-intensive for large catalogs)
  • Shopify Flow: Theoretically possible but limited to 100 products per run

Status: The issue remains unresolved with no native solution. Multiple users express frustration that this basic inventory management feature isn’t built into the platform. Staff acknowledged the feedback for potential feature development.

Summarized with AI on November 2. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hello, i have a store with lot of products but i think i forgot to add some of them to collections …
Is there a way to list all the products in my store that are not added to a collection ?

Thank you for reading and i hope your answers will help someone else : D

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2

Hi, @Victor9875 . I’m happy to look into this with you! I just have a few questions to ensure I’m being as helpful as possible.

  • Are you creating automated or manual collections?
  • If you are using automated collections, which conditions have you set up for your collections?

At this time there isn’t a buit in way to find all products not in a collection. However, you may be able to do this using a third party app. If you tell me more about how you create and organize your collections I may be able to suggest more options to help as well. For now, I’d recommend taking a look through this list of collection management apps. I’m also happy to pass your feedback about this on as I can definitely understand why a feature like this would be helpful to have built right into Shopify.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

3

i’m manually adding products to collections , that’s why i don’t want to scroll over my thousands of products and look one by one if they are corretly added to a collection :confused:

4

Hi, @Victor9875 . Thanks for getting back to me!

In this case I think a third party app would likely be the best way to do this. The reason I had asked which type of collection you were using is that you may have been able to locate the products not in collections by using the condition settings for automated collections. Since you’re using manual collections it would be more difficult to do this.

That being said, one other suggestion I have is to overwrite your product details using a CSV file. You can update your products in bulk using CSV files. With the product CSV file you can add a Collection column which would allow you to manually add each product to a collection. This would take some work as you’d need to do this for each product in the file, but there are tools that can help you speed this up, it can all be done in one place, and it should fix the issue of some products not being in collections. If you choose to do this, I recommend first exporting your products into a CSV file so that most of the information is already included in the file for you and you only need to update the collections, rather than having to create the entire file from nothing. The following guides can help you out with this:

Happy to help if you have more questions as well!

5

Gonna need an app for this really.

That is as long as you don’t have catch-all collection like /collections/all setup which also has to be account for which would mean all products are technically in a collection already.

Hypothetically with advanced effort this could be facilitated by the free shopify-flow app but that app has limitations like its get-product-data action is limited to 100 products a run.

Apps categories to look at

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The reason for this is there is no “is_in_a_collection”|“collectinless” property , or some such name, that is set either for the admin search, or part any of the products api afaik. So to find a product without collections you have to go over every product checking if it’s in a collection or not in specific collections (i.e. /all)

Then for CSV:

When you export a CSV file, the Collection column isn’t included.> > ~shopify help import-export docs.

So no collections info is part of the CSV export for some inane reason.

Nor is there a collection export , feature discussion https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/collections-export-and-import/td-p/1896810 -

6

This is RIDICULOUS.

Shopify displays the CATEGORY in the product listing page which is utterly useless and yet cannot display COLLECTION.

I have the same issue as the OP. I want to see which products I’ve forgotten to put in a Collection.

I wonder if anyone who works for Shopify has ever actually had to administer their own store…

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