How to Pin Products in a Shopify Collection (and When Not To)

Shopify has no dedicated "pin" button. To pin products you set the collection's sort order to Manually and drag the products you want into the top positions, which works for both manual and automated collections. The catch is that manual sorting applies to the whole collection, so you lose automatic sorting (best selling, newest, price) for every other product, and that tradeoff should decide how and where you pin.

What "pinning" means in Shopify

When merchants say "pin," they mean holding a specific product in a fixed spot, usually the first row, while the rest of the collection does whatever it normally does. Shopify doesn't support that mix out of the box. A collection has a single sort order, and the options are:

• Best selling
• Product title A–Z / Z–A
• Highest price / Lowest price
• Newest / Oldest
• Manually

Only Manually lets you choose positions. Pick it and you control the whole order. Pick anything else and Shopify controls the whole order. Nothing in between.

That's fine for a 20-product capsule collection. On a 400-product "All Dresses" collection it's a real decision, because you'd be giving up best-selling order on 396 products just to keep four on top.

How to pin products with manual sorting

The setup takes a couple of minutes:

1. In Shopify admin, go to Products > Collections and open the collection.
2. In the Products section, open the Sort dropdown and choose Manually.
3. Drag products by their handle into the order you want. Put the ones you're pinning in positions 1, 2, 3 and so on.
4. Save, then check the collection page on your storefront, on desktop and on a phone.

This works on automated (condition-based) collections as well as manual ones. The conditions still decide which products belong. Manual sorting only decides where they appear.

Things that catch people out

• New products don't land where you'd expect. When a new product joins a manually sorted collection (because you added it or it matched an automated condition), it gets a default position rather than one based on sales or date. After a launch or import, open the collection and check where new items ended up.
• Long collections are tedious to drag. Moving a product from position 180 to position 3 means a lot of scrolling. If you reorder big collections often, do it in sessions and only touch the top few rows. Developers can reorder through the Admin API (the collectionReorderProducts mutation), but it only works on collections with manual sort.
• Shoppers can override you. If your theme shows a sort dropdown on collection pages, a customer who picks "Price, low to high" won't see your pins. The ?sort_by= URL parameter does the same thing, so ads or emails linking to a sorted URL skip your manual order too. Link to the plain collection URL when the pinned order matters.
• Filters reshuffle the view. Storefront filters (from Shopify Search & Discovery or your theme) narrow the list. Pinned products that don't match the filter disappear, and the remaining products keep their relative manual order.

Decide what pinning is for

Pin with a reason, not because the top row feels important. Each of these jobs calls for a different setup.

A swimwear store in May might pin its new collection of two-pieces for three weeks, then switch to best-selling once there's sales data. A homewares store running a "linen week" email pins the four products in the email to the top of "Bedding" for exactly those seven days.

How many products to pin

Work from what's visible without scrolling. On most themes:

• Mobile shows 2 products per row, so the first screen is roughly 2–4 products.
• Desktop shows 3–5 per row, so the first screen is 3–10 products.
• The theme's products per page setting (often 12–24, set in the theme editor under the collection template) decides what's on page one at all.

Pinning 4 to 8 products covers the first view on both devices. Past about 12 you're hand-curating a whole page. That's fine for a small curated collection, but on a big one it usually means your manual order has gone stale. If you want 30 products in a hand-picked order, make that a separate, smaller collection.

Choosing which products to pin

Good pins share a few traits:

• Stock depth across variants. A hoodie that's sold out in S, M and L is a bad first impression, even if it shows "available" because XXL is left. Check variant-level inventory, not just the total.
• Strong main image. The first row sets the tone of the page. Pin products whose first image works as a thumbnail at mobile size.
• Variety. Four black t-shirts in a row says "we only sell black t-shirts." Spread pins across colors, price points or sub-types.
• Margin awareness. If two products sell about equally, pin the one that makes you more money.
• Fit for the collection. A clearance item pinned to the top of a full-price "New Arrivals" collection undercuts the collection's whole point.

Use your own data to choose. In Shopify, Analytics > Reports has sales by product and product views. Look at the last 30 to 90 days, not all-time, so last year's hit doesn't hold the top spot forever.

Workarounds when you don't want to lose auto-sorting

Since native pinning means manual sorting for everything, a lot of stores avoid it on large collections and use one of these instead.

A separate featured collection

Create a small manual collection like "Featured Dresses" with 4–8 products and show it in a section above the main grid, or on the homepage. Most Online Store 2.0 themes (Dawn and its descendants) let you add a "Featured collection" section to any template in the theme editor. The main "Dresses" collection can then stay on Best selling.

A collection-specific template

Make an alternate collection template in the theme editor (for example collection.dresses), add a featured section with your pinned products above the product grid, and assign that template to the collection. The pins live in the template and the grid sorts itself.

Featured product blocks

Some themes support a featured product or image-with-text block you can place above the grid. It works for a single hero product, like a launch.

The downside of all three: pinned products also show up again further down in the main grid, and they aren't part of the collection's sort, so shoppers who filter or paginate won't see them in the list. For most stores that's an acceptable tradeoff.

Sort-based "soft pins"

If the product you want on top is your newest launch, sorting by Newest puts it there with no manual work. If it's your bestseller, Best selling already does the job. Before you pin, check whether one of the built-in sorts already gives you the order you want.

Mistakes to avoid

Pinning and forgetting. This is the most common one. A product pinned for a March launch is still sitting in position 1 in August, long after sales dropped off. Set a calendar reminder for the day each campaign ends, or review your top collections on the first of every month.

Pinning products that sell out. Shopify's manual order doesn't react to inventory. When a pinned product sells out, it stays on top showing "Sold out" until you move it. If your theme setting or a stock-based condition hides out-of-stock items, the pin just disappears and the next product moves up, so you're no longer showing what you planned.

Switching a big collection to manual "just for one product." Once a 300-product collection goes manual, everything below your pins freezes in whatever order it was in. Six months later the bottom 290 products are in an order nobody chose. Use a featured section instead.

Pinning the same product everywhere. A bestseller pinned to the top of "New," "Dresses," "Summer" and "Under $100" makes every collection look the same. Shoppers browsing several collections keep seeing one product, and everything else gets less attention.

Ignoring mobile. Most collection traffic on a typical Shopify store is mobile. A pin that looks balanced in a 4-across desktop row may push your strongest product to the second screen on a phone. Check the order on an actual phone.

Linking to sorted URLs. A campaign link to /collections/dresses?sort_by=price-ascending ignores your manual order completely. Use the bare collection URL.

Measuring whether pins work

Give a pinning change two to four weeks, then compare against the same length of time before:

• Sessions and conversion on the collection page. Shopify's sessions by landing page report shows traffic to collection URLs. Check whether conversion moved.
• Sales of the pinned products. A launch that sells well only while pinned tells you something different from a product that keeps selling after you unpin it.
• Sales of what got pushed down. If the products that used to be in the first row dropped sharply, the pin just moved revenue around instead of adding to it.

Change one thing at a time. If you pin new products and launch a sale the same week, you can't tell which one moved the numbers.

A practical routine

For most stores, this keeps pinning under control:

1. Keep big catalog collections (All Products, broad categories) on an automatic sort like Best selling.
2. Use manual sort with pins only on small, curated or campaign collections.
3. Use featured sections for heroes on top of big collections.
4. Review pins monthly and the day each campaign ends, and check stock on every pinned product.
5. Keep a short note (a spreadsheet works) of what's pinned where and until when.

How Awsm Collections helps

If you'd rather pin a few products without making the whole collection manual, Awsm Collections offers pinned products on its rule-based managed collections. You fix specific products in set positions and the rest of the collection keeps sorting by your chosen rule (sales, newest, margin and so on), with an option to push out-of-stock products to the bottom. The steps are in Build a rule-based collection.