What is working for you to keep large Shopify catalogs organized

Productivity
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Topic summary

Core Challenge: As Shopify catalogs grow, maintaining organization becomes harder than adding products. Overlapping collections, menu items, and navigation accumulate from campaigns and new product lines, making stores confusing for both customers and internal teams.

Recommended Organization Strategy:

  1. Establish a “spine” of permanent collections – Core product types, key brands, and evergreen sets (new arrivals, sales) with stable URLs and fixed navigation placement.

  2. Distinguish collections from filters – Collections should be used for destinations receiving repeated traffic (menus, emails, ads); otherwise, rely on filters using product tags and metafields.

  3. Default to automated collections – Use product type, vendor, and tags for automated collections so new products fall into place without manual work. Reserve manual collections for curated stories and campaigns.

  4. Test navigation in unpublished themes – Collections are store-level, but menus and templates are theme-specific. Test new layouts in unpublished themes until customer journeys feel natural before rolling out.

Tooling Note: For very large catalogs, bulk collection management via CSV (using apps like Collection Import Export Pro) can be more efficient than editing directly in Shopify admin, which becomes slow at scale.

The poster seeks input on what rules and approaches other merchants use to keep large catalogs organized while maintaining simplicity.

Summarized with AI on November 18. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Once a Shopify catalog reaches a certain size, the hard part is no longer adding products, it is keeping the whole thing understandable for customers and for your own team. Collections, filters and navigation all grow together, and small decisions early on can make the store feel either straightforward or heavy a year later.

What I see quite a bit is a catalog that started very clean. Over time, new ranges, brands and campaigns get their own collections and menu items. None of those decisions are wrong on their own, but eventually you end up with overlap and it becomes harder to explain to a new team member how everything fits together.

The way I usually approach this on Shopify is:

  1. Define a small “spine” of permanent collections – your main product types, key brands, and evergreen sets like new arrivals and sale. Those get stable URLs and a fixed place in navigation.

  2. Be clear on collection vs filter – if you plan to send traffic to a set of products repeatedly from menus, email or ads, it usually deserves a collection. Otherwise, push it into filters powered by product type, tags or metafields.

  3. Default to automatic collections where the logic is stable – use product type, vendor and tags so new products fall into the right places without manual work. Keep manual collections for curated campaigns and stories.

  4. Work on new navigation in an unpublished theme – collections are store-level, but menus and templates live per theme. I test new menus and layouts in an unpublished theme until common journeys feel natural, then roll them out.

For very large catalogs, doing this only inside the admin can get slow. In those cases I find it easier to work with collections in bulk via CSV. I help my merchants with a tool called Collections Import Export Pro that does this, but the approach above still works even if you build and edit everything directly in Shopify.

I would be genuinely interested to hear what rules other merchants and partners use to keep large catalogs organized so the store still feels simple to shop.

2

Consistent product type/vendor rules + automated collections keep big catalogs sane. For promos, I only use temporary manual collections and never touch core navigation, cleanup stays painless.

4

Sounds like an interesting app. Give me a DM, would be happy to give it a test and some feedback.