Shopify Admin lets you delete Collections one by one, or select them page by page and delete a few at a time. When you have hundreds or thousands of Collections to remove – for example, old seasonal Collections, leftovers from a migration, or duplicates created by an app – that quickly becomes impractical.
With the Matrixify app you can bulk delete Shopify Collections by exporting them to an Excel or CSV file, marking the ones you want to remove with the DELETE Command, and importing that file back.
Deleting Collections does not delete the Products in them; Products only lose their link to those Collections. Deleting a Collection is permanent, so it is worth doing a full export first – the exported file can be kept for reference or used to restore the Collections later if needed.
1. Export your Shopify Collections
In the Matrixify app, create a New Export and select to export the Collections sheet.
To bulk delete Collections, you only need to select ID, Handle and Command columns from Basic Columns column group.
You can also include other columns if needed.
If needed, you can also apply Export Filters by using the Filters button in the Set Filters section of the Export; it will limit what Collections get exported.
Once the Export has been configured, start the Export job by using the Export button and once the Export finishes, download the file with the Download Exported File button.
2. Edit spreadsheet to bulk delete your Collections
The file might contain other Collections that you do not wish to delete. To ensure that those Collections are not updated, deleted or touched by the app you can remove those rows from the file.
Your spreadsheet should only contain rows for Collections that you wish to delete.
Then you can set the Command columns value to DELETE for all the Collections you wish to remove from your Shopify store.
3. Import the file to delete collections
Head back into the Matrixify app in your Shopify store and upload your edited file in the Import section of the app.
If all looks correct and the Collections have been correctly recognised, you can go ahead and start the Import. If you see any Failed items, then after the import has finished, you can download the Import Results file and look into the Import Comment column. This column will tell you why that collection has failed to be deleted.
That’s it – those Collections are now deleted!
Good to know
- You can bulk delete any other Shopify items the same way, like Products, Discounts, Pages, Orders, etc.
- Before you delete Shopify Collections, you might want to do the full export of all Collections with the app. You can keep that Excel file for reference, or even restore deleted collections later to your Shopify store if you need to.
- You can combine commands for the same import – delete some collections, but update other collections, and even create new collections, all at the same time.
- Read our tutorial on how to export Collections as Product columns.
