Search and Discovery: Hide Unwanted Tags

Shopify Apps
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Topic summary

Core Issue:
Users need to hide certain product tags (like “made to order” or “$15 shipping surcharge”) from customer-facing search filters while keeping them visible on the backend. These tags serve internal organizational purposes but shouldn’t appear in storefront filter options.

Key Constraints:

  • Cannot migrate to Collections due to third-party app limitations
  • One site has thousands of products with years of tag-based management
  • Migration to metafields would be too complex given existing tag infrastructure

Attempted Solutions:

  • Workaround grouping: Combining backend tags with customer-relevant tags (e.g., grouping “Made to Order” with “Gift Ideas”)
  • Custom section blocks: Attempted but failed when trying to filter multiple comma-separated tags
  • CSS hiding: Successfully hiding specific tags using CSS selectors targeting nth-child elements in filter lists

Current Status:
No native Shopify solution exists. The discussion remains unresolved, with participants expressing frustration that tag filtering/limiting isn’t built into theme settings despite being a common need for stores with backend-only tags.

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

Hello,

We use some tags like “made to order” or “$15 shipping surcharge” for us to identify products on the backend (We can’t switch to using Collections for these groups since a different app we use won’t pull products in by Collection).

We want to show some tags in our search filter options for customers, but we want to hide these backend-use-only tags. Is this possible? We are on the most current version of the District theme.

2

Did you ever get this resolved? I’ve been working on this for a couple of days now without much success trying to filter using a custom section block. Seems crazy you can’t set a limit or designate tags to be used on the front end since so many stores have back-end only or random tags added to products. I would think if you could group, you could also limit or hide.

3

No, I have not. I have just been “psuedo-hiding” them by grouping them with other tags that are relevant - i.e. “Made to Order: 1-2 Weeks Shipping” tag I grouped in with our “Gift Ideas” tag, since almost anything can be considered a gift.

I believe you can somehow use metafields or objects to hide them, but I don’t have much experience with these.

4

The site I am working on has 1000s of products and years worth of tag related product management. We’re moving from an old 1.0 theme that uses product tags for it’s collection page filters. I don’t want to move them to a meta fields solution because the migration would be a mess. Each product has so many other tags unrelated to ways we would filter the products.

Anyway, I’ve almost solved it a few times but creating a selected_tags section block in the theme filter settings similar to how the old theme works but I can’t get it to work with multiple tags separated by comma. Only one. Driving me mad. There’s something in the way Shopify and the theme parse the tags that goes beyond string fliters, etc.

5

The only way I’ve found to do this is using CSS. I’m hiding the first several tags of the first filter (I have a second filter for product tags, hence the highly specific tags):

details#Details-filter.p.tag-template–17500210102452__product-grid ul.facets-layout.facets-layout-list.facets-layout-list–text.facets__list.list-unstyled li:nth-child(-n+7) {
display: none;
}