Shopify is changing how collections work. Before, a collection was either manual (you picked the products yourself) or smart (rules picked the products for you), and you had to choose one when you created it. Now there’s just one kind of collection, and you can mix and match how products get into it: rules that add products automatically, individual products or variants you add yourself, products pulled in from another collection, and specific products or variants you exclude.
We’ve updated Bulk Product Editor to support this. Every collection in your store now shows up in the app, and you can add products to any collection. Even if a collection only has a rule like tag equals “abc”, you can still add one-off products to it — something that wasn’t possible with the old smart collections. Removing works the same way. If a product is in a collection because of a rule, removing it adds an exclusion, so the product leaves the collection even though it still matches.
Since there’s no longer a split between the two collection types, we also removed the smart/manual icons and the separate filter types. There’s just one ‘Collections’ field for edits and one collection filter for searches. If several collections share a name, the search results show each collection’s handle so you can tell them apart, and you can paste a collection ID for an exact match.
See How to Bulk Edit Collections for the details.
