Collections and filtering

Collections are how shoppers browse your store. Each one is a group of products, like “New in” or “Under 50”, and Backline gives collection pages a clean grid with room for filters and sorting. Getting your collections right is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for a small catalog.

Two ways to build a collection

Shopify offers two kinds of collections, and you can mix both.

• Automated collections fill themselves. You set conditions, such as a tag, a product type, or a price, and any product that matches is added for you, now and in the future. This is the one to reach for most of the time, because new products land in the right place on their own.
• Manual collections hold exactly the products you pick, in the order you choose. They are perfect for a curated set, like a seasonal edit or a small featured group.

To create one, go to Products → Collections in your Shopify admin, then add it to a menu so shoppers can find it.

Tip

Tag your products thoughtfully as you add them. Good tags like “linen”, “gift”, or “sale” make automated collections and filters effortless later, and they cost you nothing at the time.

Add filters so shoppers can narrow down

On a collection page, filters let a shopper refine what they see by things like availability, type, color, or price. Filtering and sorting on Backline collection pages are driven by Shopify’s free Search & Discovery app. Install it, choose the filters that fit your catalog under Apps → Search & Discovery → Filters, and the theme picks them up and presents them for you. There is nothing to switch on in the theme itself.

A few habits make filters pay off:

• Keep the set short. For a small catalog, two or three well-chosen filters help far more than a long list that overwhelms.
• Name options the way shoppers think. “Color: sand” reads better than an internal code, and the label you set in Search & Discovery is the label shoppers see.
• Check the counts. A filter with one product behind it is rarely worth the row it takes up.

On phones, the filters move into a drawer that opens on tap, so the grid keeps the full width of the screen. Your filters are not missing on mobile, they are one tap away. Open the drawer on your own phone once you have set your filters up, and check the option names still read clearly in a narrower space.

Sorting and presentation

The collection page lets shoppers sort by things like price, title, or newest, and it keeps your product cards tidy and consistent. Sort options come from Search & Discovery too, so if you want “Best selling” first for a busy collection, set it there and the theme follows. Photos cropped to the same shape are what make a grid look considered, so see Images and media for the sizes to aim for.

How each card looks, including badges, image shape, and what appears under the title, is set once in Product cards and applies across every collection. Grid spacing follows Layout and spacing, so you can loosen or tighten the whole page without touching individual collections.

Let shoppers move through a long collection

When a collection has more products than fit on one page, Backline splits it into pages with ordinary links at the bottom. Those links behave like any other link on your store: they can be bookmarked, shared, opened in a new tab, and they load even for shoppers on a slow or restricted connection where scripts have not run. Search engines follow them too, which helps deeper pages of a large collection get found.

So order matters. Put your strongest products where shoppers meet them first, either by dragging them to the top of a manual collection or by setting a default sort that surfaces them.

Note

Collections do more than group products. A clear set of collections becomes your main menu, your homepage links, and the paths shoppers follow to find what they came for.