How to Push Sold Out Products Down in Shopify Collections

None of Shopify's built-in collection sort options (best selling, alphabetical, price, date, manual) move sold-out products to the bottom. You can do it by sorting manually and keeping it up to date yourself, by having your theme reorder products when the page loads, by running a Flow automation that reacts to stock changes, or by using an app that sorts by availability. Before you pick a method, decide which sold-out products should sink and which should be hidden. That decision matters more than the tool.

Why sold-out products end up at the top

The Best selling sort is usually the culprit. It ranks products by sales history, so last month's top seller keeps position one after its last unit sells. A shopper opens "Dresses" on their phone and the first two rows are greyed-out "Sold out" badges. Most people won't scroll far enough to find what you can actually ship.

Newest sorting does a smaller version of the same thing. A launch that sold out in two days stays at the top until newer products arrive.

Manual sort is the quiet cause. You arranged the collection carefully in spring, the stock changed, and nobody went back to update the order.

Decide: sink, hide, or keep in place

Sort your sold-out products into groups before you change any settings. They don't all need the same treatment.

Pushing down usually fits category collections like "Women's Jeans" or "Coffee Beans". Hiding fits curated collections such as "Gifts Under $50", where every slot should be something the shopper can buy today.

How Shopify decides a product is "sold out"

If you get this wrong, every method below will behave oddly. Shopify treats a product as unavailable only when none of its variants can be purchased. Three settings on each variant decide that:

• Track quantity: if tracking is off, the variant is always available, even if your shelf is empty.
• Continue selling when out of stock: if this is on, a variant at 0 or below can still be bought, so it counts as available. Many pre-order setups rely on this.
• Quantity: only matters when tracking is on and continue selling is off.

So a T-shirt with only one XXL left is "available" as far as Shopify is concerned. It won't get a sold-out badge and it won't sink under any availability-based method. For apparel and footwear, that's often the bigger problem: a product that looks in stock but has nothing in the sizes most people wear.

Check these settings before you blame the sort order. A product that's untracked by mistake will never sink, whatever method you use.

Method 1: Manual sorting

In Shopify admin, go to Products > Collections, open the collection, and set Sort to Manually. Then drag sold-out products to the end.

This works well for:

• Small collections (roughly under 30 products)
• Collections you curate by hand anyway, like a homepage feature
• Stores where stock rarely changes

It stops working once stock moves regularly. A restocked product stays buried until someone notices, and a new sellout stays on top. On a store with 40 collections and daily orders, re-sorting turns into a weekly job that gets skipped. You also lose the automatic ranking that best selling or newest gave you.

Method 2: Hide sold-out products with a collection condition

Automated (smart) collections can use the condition Inventory stock is greater than 0. Products that hit zero leave the collection and return when they restock.

This hides products rather than sinking them. A few things to know:

• The condition checks variant inventory. A product stays in the collection if any one of its variants is above 0, so a dress with a single XS left still qualifies. Don't expect it to catch broken size runs.
• It looks at the quantity number, not whether the product can be bought. Pre-order products set to continue selling at 0 will drop out even though customers can still order them.
• Small collections can empty out during a stock gap. A 12-product "Best of Winter" collection can easily fall to 3.
• Taking a product out of a collection doesn't remove its product page. The URL still works and can still rank, which is usually what you want.

Many stores use this condition on curated and promotional collections and keep the main category collections complete, with sold-out items sunk.

Method 3: Reorder in the theme

Some themes have a setting that hides sold-out products or moves them to the end of collection pages. Look in the theme editor under the collection template or product grid settings. Whether it exists depends entirely on the theme, and Dawn and many other free themes don't include it.

Developers can add it in Liquid by looping through collection.products twice, showing available products in the first loop and unavailable ones in the second. The catch is pagination. Liquid only sees the products on the current page, so with 24 per page, sold-out items move to the bottom of page 1, not to the end of the collection. Page 2 might then open with in-stock products right after page 1 ended with sold-out ones. That's fine for collections that fit on one page and misleading for bigger ones.

Theme reordering also leaves the real collection order untouched, so storefront search, filters, and other sales channels still see the original order.

Method 4: Automate with Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow can trigger when a variant's inventory quantity changes and then act on the product. Common patterns:

• Add a sold-out tag when total inventory hits 0 and remove it on restock. You can use the tag in collection conditions, or in theme code to show a different badge.
• Remove a product from a manual collection when it sells out, and add it back when it restocks.
• Add a Wait step to delay an action, for example removing a product from a drop collection 48 hours after it sells out.

Flow has no simple "move to bottom" action for collection order. A developer can build one with Flow's Admin API request action and the collection reorder mutation, but that only works on manually sorted collections and needs careful testing. For most stores, tagging plus a collection condition is as far as Flow goes for this.

Method 5: Use an app that sorts by availability

Merchandising and collection apps can re-sort collections by stock status automatically, with a primary sort like best selling or newest underneath. This is the most hands-off approach. Sold-out products sink and restocked ones come back up across the whole collection, not just page 1, without anyone dragging products around.

When you compare apps, ask:

• Does it re-sort when inventory changes, or only on a daily schedule?
• Does it judge availability the way Shopify does, including continue selling?
• Does it edit your theme code, or only the collection order?
• What happens to your existing collections if you uninstall it?

Example setups

Apparel store, 600 products, 30 collections. Main categories use best selling with sold-out items sunk. "Gifts Under $50" uses the inventory condition so it only shows buyable items. A Flow workflow tags products low-stock when inventory drops below a set number, and the merchant reviews that tag weekly to catch broken size runs.

Coffee roaster, 40 products. Small enough for manual sorting, and stock changes on a predictable roast schedule. They re-sort after each roast day. Single-origins that are gone until next harvest come out of collections but keep their product pages live.

Sneaker store with weekly drops. "Latest Drops" is a smart collection built on a drop-live tag. When a pair sells out, a Flow workflow waits 48 hours (Wait step), then removes the drop-live tag, so the pair leaves the drop page after its time as proof of demand. Category collections like "Running" always sink sold-out pairs.

Mistakes to avoid

Deleting sold-out products. Deleting breaks the URL, throws away any search ranking it built, and ends back-in-stock signups. Sink it, take it out of collections, or archive it if it's gone for good. If you do remove a page, add a redirect to the closest collection under Content > Menus > View URL redirects.

Hiding everything. If every collection hides sold-out items, small collections look thin and shoppers lose track of products they'd happily wait for. Keep hiding for curated and promotional collections.

Ignoring untracked inventory. Products with Track quantity off never count as sold out. On the Products list, check the Inventory column for "Inventory not tracked" and make sure each one is intentional.

Counting pre-orders as sold out. If you use continue selling for pre-orders, an inventory-quantity condition hides products you're actively selling.

Fixing page 1 only. Theme reordering on a paginated collection gives you a tidy first page and a messy second one. Check pages 2 and 3 on mobile.

Forgetting the homepage and menus. Featured collection sections on the homepage use the collection's sort order. If that collection was sorted by hand three months ago, it's probably showing sold-out items to every visitor.

Ignoring broken size runs. A dress with only XS left counts as in stock but won't sell to most visitors. Add a low-stock check alongside your sold-out handling.

A simple weekly check

1. Find your top 5 collections by traffic in Analytics > Reports (sessions by landing page) and open them on your phone.
2. Count sold-out badges in the first two rows. Aim for zero.
3. Check the homepage featured collection sections.
4. On the Products list, sort by Inventory (lowest first) and confirm each product at 0 is sinking, hidden, or archived, based on the table above.

How Awsm Collections helps

Awsm Collections builds rule-based collections that sync to regular Shopify collections. Each product group's sort has an option to push out-of-stock products to the bottom while your main sort (sales, newest, price and so on) stays in charge underneath, and collections re-sync on a schedule, so restocked products move back up on their own. On Pro and Enterprise, "Make self-optimizing" applies the Smart sort, which ranks in-stock products by last-30-day revenue weighted by margin, boosts products whose sales are picking up, and sinks sold-out ones on every sync. The app doesn't edit your theme and only manages collections it creates. See Build a rule-based collection for the steps.