In the latest UI change, I have lost the ability to filter out archived products when viewing a collection in admin. I understand I can filter them out in product view, this is not what I want. I want to be able to filter out archived products from a collection because I currently have to click “next” 400 times to the get to the end of a collection to reorder products manually as I want to.
I tried to find workarounds. See if they help u until Shopify updated its ui.
Do it from the Products page, instead of collection.
Step 1. Products, then add filter Collection = your collection, and filter Status = Archived.
Step 2. Tick the checkbox in the header row to select them, open the … menu, and click Remove from collection(s).
Though here u have to click next page again and again if your number of archived products is too large.
Step 3. Tick only the collection you are cleaning up, then Save.
Result.
Another method Add condition, Status, is not equal to, Archived, with Match all conditions at the top. Archived products then never enter the collection in the first place, and any you archive in future drop out on their own.
Tested on a Shopify store running the same new collections UI you are on.
Thank you for this idea, however it is approximately 23,000 archived products that are automatically added to the collection based on a tag they have. If there was the ability to sort collections by “last updated” that would also alleviate my need to manually reorder products in this collection.
The tag detail in your follow up changes the answer, and I think it makes the remove from collection route a dead end rather than just a slow one.
If those 23,000 archived products are landing in the collection automatically because of a tag, then membership is being recomputed from that condition. Taking them out of the collection does not stick, because anything still carrying the tag simply qualifies again. So even if you did click through every page, you would be undoing your own work.
The lever is the tag, not the collection. Go to Products, filter Collection equals your collection and Status equals Archived, then use Remove tags to strip the tag that is pulling them in. They drop out of the collection for good and your positions collapse down to your real products. The part that saves you the 400 clicks is that ticking the checkbox in the header row only grabs the current page, but once you tick it a link appears offering to select all products matching your filter. That is the one you want, because the bulk action then applies to the whole set instead of page by page.
Worth trying on a handful first in case that tag is doing other work somewhere, another collection or an automation you have forgotten about. If it turns out the tag has to stay on archived products for some other reason, the newer collections model does let you exclude specific products from an automated collection, but that is per product so it will not scale to 23,000.
Separately, archived products do not render on the storefront, so none of this is reaching customers. It is purely an admin side merchandising problem. Does not make it less irritating, but you are not shipping anything broken while you work it out.
Your sort by last updated request is a genuine gap and I do not think there is a way around it today. Is the manual order something you rework regularly, or is it more that you set it once and the archived clutter is what makes revisiting it painful?
Thanks @lumine - I’m running the tag removal on the archived products right now, so I think once it gets through the 23,000 this will solve my frustration.
For the full view of why I apply the tag and how it factors into my work flow: I have a consignment shop so each listing is unique to the specific item (hence the huge number of products). Items receive a price reduction at 30 and 60 days after listing. Each night I pull up active listings from those 30 and 60 days past and reduce their price. Then I add the “price reduction” tag so that they are added to the markdowns collection. Once that’s done, I go to the markdowns collection and scroll to the end of the group (because those are the things that have just had the tag added) and manually bump them to the top of the list so that the new price reductions are the first shown to the customer in the collection. I’ve tried to think through smarter ways to accomplish this than manual sort, but since each night’s price reductions involve some 30 day old listings and some 60 day old listings, auto sort by date created isn’t an option (the 60 days would get buried even though I want them up top). I think unless there is a last updated option created sometime, I’ll be stuck with the manual sort I’ve been doing.
That workflow makes a lot of sense once you explain the consignment angle, and you are right that there is no native last updated sort, so you are not missing an obvious setting.
Two things that might help. First, so you do not have to repeat the 23,000 sweep later: whatever eventually archives an item should also strip the price reduction tag at archive time. A Flow triggered on the product being archived that removes that tag keeps archived items from drifting back into markdowns, so tonight’s cleanup stays clean going forward.
Second, on the nightly sort. The reason native sorting cannot do what you want is that none of the built in sorts know when a price was reduced, only when the product was created. The way stores usually get around this is to stamp the reduction date onto the product as a metafield the moment the tag goes on (Flow can do that in the same step), then sort the collection by that metafield descending. That puts tonight on top automatically whether the item is 30 or 60 days old, and it kills the manual bump. It does lean on a collection sort that can read a metafield, since the native sorter will not.
Are you adding the price reduction tag by hand each night, or is Flow already doing part of that? That changes how much of this you can hand off.