How to bulk import and create Shopify Collections

In Shopify Collections, you can include Products with manual selection and also by a set of rules/conditions. Collections set up with conditions will be updated dynamically as soon as more Products appear that match the conditions set.

You can create Collections and include Products by their Tags, or any other Product fields like Vendor, Type, Price, etc. in the Smart Collection. This tutorial will show you how to create a Shopify Collection including Products by Tags. The same approach you can use to create conditions based on other attributes.

Steps in short

1. Prepare an Excel or CSV file with Collections by Product tag, according to the Matrixify template.
2. Import the created file into Shopify using Matrixify.
3. Enjoy your newly imported Collections!

1. Prepare the Excel or CSV file with Collections data

Minimum columns needed to create a Collection with an Import are:

• Title – the Collection title/name
• Source: Type – indicates what Source type the collection applies its Conditions to, such as Products, Variants or Collections.
• Inclusion: Type – shows if the specific row has an Include or Exclude condition rule.
• Condition: Field – what attribute field condition applies to, for example, Tag, Type, Vendor, Status, etc. See full list in our Collections documentation page.
• Condition: Relation – what is the field’s value relation, values such as Equals, Includes, Does not contain. This field can have different allowed values based on the Condition: Field, see full list in our Collections documentation page.
• Condition: Value – the value that the condition rule checks against the field and relation specified. Also, different possible values based on the Condition: Field value set.

You can also add other columns from our Collections template if you wish to set them for your Collections, for example, Body HTML for the Collections Description, Image Src for the Collections featured image, etc. See the full list of all available Collection template columns in our documentation.

In my example, I will be creating a simple Collection with 2 conditions, one for Tag and one for Price attribute, thus the spreadsheet file will have 2 rows for the same collection.

Collection condition rule examples

Let’s look at a few typical examples of Collection rules.

Sale Collection – every discounted product

The most common Collection setup. A product is “on sale” when it has a Compare at price set, so the rule is simply: Compare at price is not empty. No tagging needed – it updates itself as you add or remove discounts.

Brand Collection – all products from one Vendor

A Collection for a specific brand set as Vendor for Products. Matches on the Vendor field, so any Product under that vendor lands in the Collection automatically.

In Stock – hide sold-out items

A “Shop what’s available” Collection. Products with inventory below 1 are excluded; sold-out ones drop out automatically and reappear when restocked.

2. Import Collections spreadsheet using Matrixify

Now let’s import the created file into the Store with the Matrixify app app.

Go to the Matrixify app, and in the Home page Import section, you can upload the file.
First, the file will be analyzed by the app. Once the file is analyzed, you need to check that the app has recognized the file correctly as Collections and that the item count in the file looks correct.

You do not need to adjust any Import Options, default ones will work fine.

Then press the “Import” button and the file will start importing.
Once the import has started, you can follow its progress in the app.
You can close the app while the import is running as it is happening on our servers.

If you change your mind about something, you can press the “Cancel” button to cancel the import job, and start over. Thus far imported Products will already have the updated descriptions in your Shopify store.

Also, when canceling the import job, Matrixify will still generate the Import Results file for you for the items that were imported before canceling.

3. Enjoy your imported Shopify Collections!

Once the import is finished, you will see the job status as “Finished” in the Matrixify app.

If you see any Failed items, then after the import has finished, you can download the Import Results file and look at the Import Comment column. It will tell why the particular Product failed. Then you can fix that issue and re-import just the Products that failed with the fixed rows again.

Now you can see your new Shopify Collections in your Shopify store!

Good to know:

• You can export the Products that belong to the Smart Collection, by setting the “Collection” filter when exporting Products.
• In Shopify you can create up to 5000 Smart Collections. This is what you also can bulk import with the Matrixify app.
• You can use other Product fields in conditions, like, Vendor, Type, Price, etc. Tags was just one example.
• Read the full description of all fields of Shopify Smart / Automated Collections.
• Read our tutorial on how to bulk manage your Shopify tags.
• Read our tutorial on exporting Collections as Product columns.