It would be great if there was an option to manually renumber your items within a shopify collection, presently you can drag and drop, and that is fine until you want an item in the 1-60 and it is on another page 61 or above. since all your drafts and archived work shows also and there is no filter to only show actives within your category, this is a real problem when manually reordering. could we please please please look into a simple fix to have a back door option, like a number placement edit where you can manually type in the placement for an item in the list? also an option to filter out drafts and archived items would be great so you dont have to keep going live with a list to check its placement.
The thing that might help in the short term: what you’re asking for already exists, it just isn’t in the admin UI. The Admin API has a collectionReorderProducts call that takes a product and an explicit position number, which is exactly the “type in the placement” you’re describing. It only works on collections set to manual sort, and it runs as a background job rather than instantly, but it means an app or a small script can already do this today. Worth saying in a feature request, because it makes the ask much smaller than “build us a new sorting system”.
The page to page part has a cause that’s worth knowing. That manual order is one single list covering every product in the collection, and drafts and archived ones hold their slot in it exactly like active ones do. Your storefront then renders only the active ones. So position 61 in the admin is almost never position 61 on the live page, and the gap widens with every draft sitting in there. That’s the real reason you keep having to publish something just to see where it landed.
Which makes the cheapest fix available today a staging habit rather than a setting: keep a product out of the collection until it’s ready to go active, and add it at that point. Then the admin list and the storefront list are the same list, and the drag is short because nothing invisible is padding it out. Not a substitute for a position field, but it stops the guessing.
How many drafts are sitting in the collection you’re fighting with? If it’s a handful, the staging approach probably solves it outright. If it’s hundreds, the API route is the one worth having someone wire up once.
Unfortunately a lot of this is in “greek” to me since I’m just a small business owner. I dont enjoy having to do nor have the time to recategorize products only when going live, so what you’re suggesting isn’t feasible, unfortunately. Im not sure what api is or why having to transport into another app would be easier, couldn’t it just be easier to edit this where we are already editing? I mean just saying I already pay a lot per month to run this, more costs are not what I’m up for, so more pay to play apps are not the answer I was hoping for.
@ladygsoapco
I completely agree. Drag and drop works for small collections but once you have hundreds of products spread across multiple pages, its slow and frustrating. Being able to enter a position number (e.g., move a product to position 25) would make manual merchandising much more efficient.
I’d also love to see filters for Active, Draft, and Archived products within the collection editor. Hiding nonactive products would make reordering much easier and eliminate the need to keep checking the live collection just to verify product placement.
Hi @ladygsoapco
I can understand how this will help, particularly those stores that have huge product catalogues.
This could be worked around by using automatic collection, whenever it is possible, because automatic collections minimize the necessity of sorting manually. In case it is mandatory to order the products manually, then there are some third party applications that provide better ways to do sorting as compared to the Shopify collection editor.
However, the option to enter a product’s position number manually and hide the drafts and the archived products would certainly increase the efficiency of collection management in Shopify.
I can understand why this becomes difficult with larger collections. Once a collection spans multiple pages, drag-and-drop is no longer a very efficient way to place products in a specific position.
At the moment, Shopify’s manual sort is primarily designed around dragging products into the desired order, so there isn’t a built-in option to jump directly to a numbered position within the collection.
One workaround is to temporarily reduce the number of products you’re managing at one time by filtering or updating products in smaller batches before reviewing the final order. It’s also worth checking the storefront after making changes, since Draft and Archived products can make the admin view different from what customers actually see.
A “Move to position” option, along with filters to show only Active products while reordering, would make managing large collections much more practical and would help reduce the amount of manual scrolling required.
Hopefully the Shopify team considers this feedback, as it seems like it would improve the experience for merchants managing larger catalogues.
Out of curiosity, approximately how many products are in the collection you’re trying to organise? That context could help illustrate how this limitation affects day-to-day management.
Well i have 5,000 products in my active, drafts, and archived, and about 40 categories live, since I try to keep things fresh for the customer and not do work over and over again (changes to your listing in placement can alter seo as can deleting instead of archiving, plus hundreds of hours spent on copy and metas) I regularly have over 200 items or more in categories, so this would be a massive feature change for me. Plus managing the view order is able to reduce too many of the same visual type of product bunched together, for example who wants to see 8 beige sweaters in a row? I just my perfumes I have 97 and I like to keep them in a certain order for the customer since they are permanent catalog
You are right to push back, and I owe you a correction. I pointed you at the API and that was the wrong answer for what you are doing. The thing you are asking for already exists in the admin, for free, in the same screen you are already working in.
Open the collection, tick the checkboxes next to the products you want to move, and a Move menu appears. It has To the beginning, To the end, and To position, where you type the number. So moving something to slot 25 is type 25 and done. No dragging across pages, no app, no code. It works on a batch as well, so you can select several beige sweaters at once and space them out in one action.
Shopify’s own page for it is help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/collections/collection-layout if you want the exact steps.
One thing worth knowing is that the list shows 60 products per page, so with 200 plus in a category the number you type counts through the whole collection rather than the page you happen to be looking at.
The other half of what you described is a separate problem and it is the part that makes positions feel wrong even after you set them. Your drafts and archived products are still sitting inside those collections holding slots, so position 25 in the admin is not position 25 on the storefront where shoppers only see what is active. If you want the two to line up, the collections need to contain only what is live. I could not find that documented anywhere, so I would test it on one small collection before trusting it across all 40.
Given you are keeping the perfumes in a deliberate order, does To position get you what you needed, or is the draft and archived pileup the bigger headache?
Hello there @ladygsoapco
A good workaround is to add the collection conditions and product states filters so that the number of products that is managed is smaller. If you have a large catalog, organize your products by tags or collections, so you can better manage them. A manual position input would definitely improve the experience of shop owners with big collections, especially when the precise merchandising order is important to them.
Your example about avoiding eight similar beige sweaters in a row makes an important distinction: this is not only about moving one item to the top, but about preserving a visual sequence across the whole collection. “Move to position” may reduce the dragging, but Draft and Archived products can still make the admin position different from what customers actually see.
When you arrange a collection with 200+ items, do you keep any reference outside Shopify for the intended sequence, or is the live storefront currently the only way you can verify that the visual order is right?