Hey, Scott Austin here.

Today I'm excited to share with you a new feature from Shopify that I've long been waiting for. And that is a new Collection engine. For too long, we only had manual collections and smart collections with very simple rule sets. Shopify is currently rolling out its new Collection engine. I've seen it in a couple of clients' stores this week, and it will be rolling out to all stores shortly.

Why Collections Matter More Than You Think

First, let's discuss what a collection actually does. Here's how I like to frame it: collections are a tool that transforms your store from a list of products into a decision-making engine. A raw catalog puts the entire burden on the shopper. It basically says to the shopper here are 500 products; good luck finding the right one for you. But, well-thought-out collections do the opposite. They help customers understand the differences within your catalog, like what's for beginners versus pros, what's for summer versus winter, what's under $50 versus premium. And that understanding is what lets shoppers make informed choices. Every informed choice moves them one step further down the funnel toward a purchase. That's the real job of a collection: not just displaying products, but guiding decisions.

And collections do that work structurally, not just visually. To a shopper, a collection looks like a product grid. But behind the scenes, it dictates your global navigation. It determines how your filtering works. It even determines which products are eligible for specific discounts at checkout. So when the logic running collections is limited, everything downstream suffers.

And the old model was inflexible. I won't spend a lot of time on it, because you've lived it: every collection had to be either manual or rules-based. You picked a lane at creation and could never mix the two. No rules with exceptions, no pinned products on top of automated logic. So store owners worked around it with exclusion tags like "hide-from-sale", or paid for third-party apps that re-synced product lists.

Store owners asked for better for years. Hybrid collections were one of the longest-standing requests in the Shopify backlog. And with the Summer release, improvements are finally here.

The New Architecture: A Union of Sources

Shopify rewrote how collections work natively. The old split between manual (custom) and automated (smart) collections is gone.

The good news is that all of your existing collections are compatible with the new engine. Shopify converts them automatically, and there's no migration work on your end. A manual collection just becomes a collection with a single manual source, and a smart collection becomes a collection with a single rules source. They keep working exactly as they did before, and you can start layering the new capabilities onto them whenever you're ready.

Here's the core paradigm shift: a collection is no longer a static list, and it's no longer a single rule. A collection is now defined as a union or combination of sources.

There are three new building blocks worth understanding.

The primary building block is what I'll call the smart rules block. It's the direct evolution of the old smart collection rules, but more capable. Within a single smart rules block, you can define automated conditions like "price is over $100" and also simultaneously define explicit manual inclusions and explicit manual exclusions, all in the same place.

Now, the new rules block is not perfect and still carries some of the limitations from the old engine. For example, you still can't create a rule that says tag contains "used". That's because the only rule types for tags are still "includes" and "does not include". Let's hope that these limitations get addressed in future releases.

The second building block is nested collections. This is the ability for one collection to natively inherit the complete membership of another collection just by referencing it.

The third is app-owned sources. In the old world, a merchandising app had to take over a collection and push its own product list into it. Now an app acts more like a consultant. An external app, say a product recommendation engine or a reviews platform, can publish a source of logic natively into Shopify. For example, a reviews app can publish a source that says "here are the products with five stars," and you can layer that source into your collection as one piece of your overall setup.

Most apps don't yet support this but you'll be seeing updates from them soon. 

Real-World Scenarios

Let's ground this with examples, because these building blocks unlock scenarios that just weren't achievable before this update.

Scenario one: the self-maintaining hybrid collection. Picture a merchandiser at an apparel brand, prepping for a summer sale. She wants a single page that pulls in all products with a compare-at price to include sale products. But the brand just launched a new line that cannot be discounted, and those items share some back-end tags with the sale items. On top of that, she wants three specific high-margin hero products pinned to the top of the collection.

In the old world, the merchandiser is exporting CSVs to figure out which new line items accidentally got pulled into the sale collection, and paying a third-party app to constantly re-sync a custom list to keep the three hero products pinned.

But now, she builds one collection. Step one, automation: she defines a condition to include all products where the compare-at price is greater than zero. Every sale item across the catalog gets included. Step two, exclusion: she adds an explicit exclusion: exclude any product in the new line. Step three, curation: she pins her three hero products to positions one, two, and three.

Scenario two: nested navigation. Think about the navigation of an athletic apparel brand. You've got a top-level department called Activewear, and beneath it, Leggings, Tops, and Shorts. Previously, the parent Activewear page needed its own separate rule set that duplicated the logic of all three children. And any time a child's rules changed, someone had to remember to update the parent collection to match, or products would drift out of sync between the two levels.

With nested collections, the Activewear parent just declares: my sources are the Leggings collection, the Tops collection, and the Shorts collection. The logic from the sub-collections is inherited dynamically. Update the definition of a legging, and the parent Activewear collection updates also.

One caveat worth knowing: there's a one-level nesting limit. You can't have Women's inherit from Activewear which inherits from Leggings. The reason is speed. Every extra layer of inheritance is more logic Shopify has to walk through before it can draw the page, so the limit protects storefront performance.

Variant-Level Targeting

Okay, so far we've been talking about whole products. For example T-shirts. What happens when that t-shirt comes in red, blue, green, and yellow?

This brings us to what I think is one of the more powerful shifts in the update: moving from product-level inclusion to variant-level targeting.

Until now, the atomic unit of a collection was the product, not the variant. Mark one leftover neon orange XXL of a $500 winter parka down to $50, and the entire parka landed in your Summer Clearance collection, showing the default black-parka image with a misleading "$50 to $500" price range. Shoppers clicked expecting a deal, found out the truth on the product page, and probably bounced.

That limitation is now gone. When you configure any of the composable sources we've been discussing, you can set the targeting to the variant level. Collections can now target, hold, and display specific variations of products independent of their sibling variants. And the storefront renders the right image, the right price, and the right inventory status for just that variant.

Let me give you a few examples.

Valentine's Day. You want a curated page of red apparel. In the past, if a popular dress came in black, white, and red and you placed it into the Valentine's collection, the grid rendered the default image: the black dress. The shopper had to click into the product page, find the color swatch, and click red just to see what the red version looked like. Now you build a collection targeting only the red variants: color equals red. The collection page automatically displays the red image, the specific accurate price of the red dress, and the real-time inventory status of only the red dress. If the red is sold out but the black is in stock, the old system still showed the product as available. The new system accurately shows it as sold out, or removes it entirely based on your preference.

Inventory clearing. Remember the XXL parka? What if you intentionally want to clear extreme sizes across your entire catalog? You create a composable source that targets XS and XXL variants across every product category, group them into a single "Extended Sizes" or "Last Chance Fits" collection. 

Point of Sale. Picture a retail worker on the floor of a store, helping a customer on Shopify POS on an iPad. In the legacy system, their search results were cluttered with warehouse-only items, digital gift cards, and dropship variants that weren't physically in the building. Now you can create a variant-targeted collection that acts as a localized feed with only the specific variations currently stocked and physically available on that floor. It cuts down search friction for staff.

Connecting It to Conversion

Beautiful visual merchandising is great. Making sure the red dress shows the red image matters. But let's talk about the raw business metrics, because ultimately conversion rate and margin are what matter.

Variant targeting improves conversion through what I'd call frictionless discovery. Remember the framing from the top of the episode: collections as a decision-making engine. The engine works when every page answers a question for the shopper instead of raising one. Every time a customer has to click, filter, scroll, or guess, you're making them think. And every bit of extra thinking costs you a slice of your traffic.

Take that Valentine's red collection. Under the old system, the purchase path is high-friction: click the email, land on the grid, see a black dress, get confused, click it anyway, load the product page, select red, see the red image, check if your size is in stock in red, and finally check the actual price of the red variant. That's a four-to-five-click journey full of opportunities for disappointment. You're making the customer work to give you their money, and nobody wants to work to spend money.

Under variant targeting, the thinking required drops way down. They click "Valentine's Red." The storefront renders a grid of red products. The price displayed is accurate. And if they use a faceted filter on the page, say by material, the filter logic calculates based only on the red variants in the collection. No misleading price ranges, no wrong default images. They see what they want, verify stock instantly, and add to cart directly from the grid. That directly reduces bounce and increases add-to-cart velocity.

But collections aren't just visual grids. They're core business primitives, used operationally across the platform to trigger store logic.

For example: go back to that Extended Sizes collection targeting XS and XXL variants. Because the collection is now variant-aware, you can use it as the trigger for an automatic discount. You go into Shopify Discounts, and write a simple rule that applies an automatic 20% discount to any item in the Extended Sizes collection. Because the system now understands variant membership, the checkout engine accurately discounts just the variants you want discounted. Shopper adds a size medium of a t-shirt? Full price. Adds the XXL of that exact same t-shirt? The engine detects its membership in the collection and applies the 20% off automatically, no promo code.

One Heads-Up With Apps

One heads-up on apps. Your existing collections that Shopify converted over are fine, and apps will keep seeing those like they always have. The caution is for collections you build with the new features, like variant targeting or multiple sources. Apps that haven't been updated for the new Collection engine can't see those new-style collections yet. And that failure can be silent, like an email campaign that goes out with an empty product grid. So if you use apps that read your collections, like email marketing tools or product feeds, check with those app developers before you build collections that use the new features.

Wrapping Up

So what does this all mean?

Store owners now have improved control over collections that makes new scenarios possible for your store. 

It's a real improvement of the platform, one that finally respects the complexity of real-world merchandising. The gap between what you want your collection pages to do and what the platform can actually deliver has narrowed. And that matters because of where we started this episode: collections are what turn your store from a list of products into a decision-making engine. The more precisely you can shape each collection, meaning the right products, the right variants, and the right order, the better your store helps customers understand their options, make confident choices, and move down the funnel.

Check it out when you see the new collections released to your store.  They are pretty cool.

Thanks for listening.