Optimized Collection Sorting in Shopify: Complete Guide

How products are sorted within your collections directly impacts customer experience and sales. This guide covers Shopify's sorting options and strategies for optimizing product order in your collections.

Available Sorting Options

Shopify offers several built-in sort orders for collections:

• Best selling: Products ranked by sales performance
• Alphabetically (A-Z, Z-A): By product title
• Price (low-high, high-low): By product price
• Date (new-old, old-new): By creation date
• Manually: Custom drag-and-drop order

Choosing the Right Sort Order

Best Selling

Recommended for:

• Main category collections
• Collections with proven top performers
• Building social proof through popular items

Price-Based Sorting

Recommended for:

• Budget-conscious customer segments
• Comparison shopping categories
• Sale or clearance collections

Date-Based Sorting

Recommended for:

• New arrivals collections
• Seasonal merchandise
• Frequently updated inventory

Manual Sorting Strategies

To use manual sort order, go to Products > Collections, open a collection, and set Sort to "Manually." Then drag products into your desired order:

• High-margin items first: Place products with the best margins in positions 1-4, since most collection pages show 4 products per row on desktop — these get seen before scrolling
• Strong imagery up front: Products with lifestyle photos convert better than white-background shots — lead with your most visually compelling items
• Rotate regularly: Set a weekly or bi-weekly reminder to re-sort manual collections based on recent sales data from Analytics > Reports > Sales by product
• Check mobile view: Products display in a single column on mobile — preview at Online Store > Themes > Customize > Mobile view to ensure your top picks aren't buried

Sorting and Customer Experience

Optimize sorting for how customers shop:

• Use analytics to understand browsing patterns
• Provide sort options in your theme for customer control
• Consider default sort by collection type
• Test different sort orders and measure impact

Automating Sort Order

Reduce manual sorting work by choosing automated sort options at Products > Collections > [Collection] > Sort:

• "Best selling" sort: Shopify ranks products by total sales — this updates automatically as orders come in, so your proven performers always appear first
• Tag-based prioritization: Add tags like priority_high or featured and create automated collections that surface tagged items — combine with manual sort to pin featured products at the top
• Search & Discovery app: Shopify's free app (install at Apps > Search & Discovery) lets you boost or bury specific products within collections without changing the sort order for everything else
• Third-party sort apps: AWSM Collections and similar apps can sort by metrics Shopify doesn't natively support — recent sales velocity, profit margin, conversion rate, or multi-factor combinations

SEO Considerations

Sort order affects SEO in several concrete ways:

• First-page products get crawled more: Search engines prioritize the first page of a collection — products sorted to positions 1-24 (typical first page) receive more internal link equity than those on page 5
• Engagement signals: Google tracks bounce rate and time on page — if your top-sorted products don't match what the collection title promises, visitors bounce and your rankings drop
• Structured data: Some themes include product structured data from the first few collection items — putting your best-reviewed, in-stock products first improves rich snippet quality

Best Practices

• Match sort order to collection purpose
• Review and adjust sorting based on performance data
• Keep manual sorting updated as inventory changes
• Document sorting decisions for team consistency

Conclusion

Effective collection sorting balances business goals with customer preferences. Choose sort orders that match how your customers shop, use automation where possible, and regularly review performance to optimize product placement.

Related Resources

• Shopify Help: Collections
• What is a Shopify Collection?
• Shopify Analytics Guide