Need more options within Smart Collections

Technical Q&A
1

Can you please add an additional condition option, like “AND” or “OR” within Smart collections so that we can have multiple types of conditions within a smart collection?

I sell different types of products and use smart collections to specify products by category and a custom product field, and am currently using “products must match: all conditions”, but this option is limited.

I need two different products to belong to one collection. For example:

  1. Metal Beads collection
  • category: Beads
  • custom product metafield: Silver

I would also like the following conditions to apply to this same Metal beads collection:

  • category: Beads
  • custom product metafield: Brass

The issue I am having is the limited options “products must match: all conditions” and products must match: any condition”.

If I choose “products must match: all conditions”, with the category: beads, and include Brass and Silver, than neither Brass or Silver beads will populate. And if I choose “products must match: any condition”, with the category: beads, all bead products, including Silver, Brass, Glass, Stone, etc. will populate. I do not want that.

I want products that are categorized: Beads, and have the custom product metafield of Silver or Brass, to populate in the collection only.

Can you please add an additional condition option, like “AND” or “OR” within Smart collections so that we can have multiple types of conditions within a smart collection?

2

I would not be expecting this.
It has been like this for years and no changes has been made to make it more flexible.

There are several apps which can monitor your products and assign a (say) tag “Metal” if metafield value is either “Silver” or “Bronze”

Then you can create collection like “Category: Beads” AND “tag: Metal”.

Some apps are free (like Flow), some have free tier. Search for Auto tags in app store.

3

This is already solved upstream of collections by using automations, like shopify-flow(free) or mechanic(pay what feels good) to tag products etc.
So agree with @tim_tairli don’t hold your breath, invest in your processes.
It would be healthier to have this built into business spreadsheets to just build tags than to put everything into shopify-flow and thus shopify’s basket; especially as hardcoded logic which should be avoided.

These are the peer to peer forums, shopify-staff pulled stakes long ago.
location location location:
Submit formal feature requests to shopify help support advisors DIRECTY:
https://help.shopify.com/

4

The Flow approach others mentioned is the right direction — here’s how to actually set it up for your use case:

  1. Create a Flow workflow triggered on Product created and another on Product updated
  2. Add a condition: if your metal metafield equals Silver → add tag metal-finish
  3. Add an else branch: if it equals Brass → add the same tag metal-finish
  4. In your Smart Collection, set two conditions with “all conditions”: category = Beads AND tag = metal-finish

That gives you the AND/OR logic Smart Collections can’t do natively. You’ll also want to do a one-time backfill — use a scheduled Flow trigger with a “Get products” action to tag your existing products.

If your catalog is large or your rules get more complex than a handful of metafield values, Flow can get unwieldy fast. In that case Leap Auto Tags and Tag Genie are both worth looking at — they’re built specifically for this kind of rule-based tagging, support complex AND/OR conditions against metafields, and handle bulk backfills cleanly. Both start around $8-9/month.

That being said, if you’re doing under 20 of these, I’d probably just stick with Flow.