Hey everyone! Diana here from the Merchandising product team.
We’re shipping the biggest change to the Collections API in years, and we’re putting it in developers’ hands first. The new model is available now in the 2026-07 release candidate, ahead of the redesigned merchant admin experience that rolls out in the coming weeks.
What’s new
Collections are no longer split into “smart” and “custom.” In 2026-07, every collection is made of one or more product group sources, and a single collection can combine them:
CollectionConditionsSource — typed conditions, manual inclusions and exclusions, and optional variant targeting.
CollectionSubCollectionSource — membership inherited from another collection.
This replaces the smart/custom distinction and the stringly-typed ruleSet with a composable, strongly-typed model: one collection, multiple group sources, conditions and curated picks working together.
What you can build
Variant-accurate storefronts — include only the red variants in a “Valentine’s Red” collection so swatches, prices, and filters stay correct (targetType: VARIANTS).
Self-maintaining collections — include and exclude on the same source, so collections like “Product under $100 except preorders” stays current automatically.
Nested navigation — build an “Activewear” parent from sub-collections “Leggings", “Tops” and “Shorts” that updates itself (CollectionSubCollectionSource).
Operational collections — target “XS and XXL” variants for an automatic discount and check ProductVariant.inCollections in Functions, no manual product lists.
App sources — publish your app’s signal as a first-class source merchants add to their collections (collectionConditionsSourcesByApp).
What you need to know
Action required: API versions older than 2026-07 will return filtered results for collections with new features. Existing smart and manual collections auto-convert to single-source equivalents and keep returning data on older versions. Update your app to 2026-07 and adopt the sources model before the merchant rollout in the coming weeks, so you stay in sync with every collection merchants create.
Collection.ruleSet, CollectionInput, collectionAddProducts / collectionAddProductsV2/ collectionRemoveProducts, collectionsToJoin / collectionsToLeave, and collectionRulesConditions are deprecated.
In Functions, use ProductVariant.inAnyCollection / inCollections — the Product-level fields are deprecated and return incorrect results for variant-scoped collections.
As you’re discovering the new API, we’d love questions or feedback. Is anything missing that blocks your apps’ use case? How’s the migration from ruleSet / CollectionInput to sources?
Drop your questions and feedback in this thread — we’re checking in regularly.
This is fantastic! How will variant-specific collections be accessible on the storefront (liquid/storefront api) - as I can’t see any changes there just yet!
@diana_cheptene can you also share the link of the documentation regarding webhooks for this new unified collections resource? What will be the trigger and payload?
Best new feature of Editions is the last link on the page
Really interested in how this will work in the storefront and the Liquid API. Everything from sub collections to variant-specific collections.
Also, guess this opens up for way better breadcrumbs?
Does that mean we cannot customize the order of products with the new collection source system?
Ultimately could we have a better overview of what it will look like for merchants? It’s very hard to build anything as we’re basically blind on the form that this will take.
Will connect with our internal team on the question related to collectionReorderProducts mutation - are there any other specific questions you have on this?
We consume collections by looking up the collection and extracting a list of product ids, looking at the documentation the way we consume this information doesn’t seem to have changed, however i note that in future we will be able to get a list of variant ids should we wish?
@diana_cheptene@Liam-Shopify we really need answers here. Do you realize it will literally break many collections related apps and we have now less than two weeks to migrate and many unanswered questions?
I was hoping it would turn into some form of conversation
Hi @Liam-Shopify does it mean that this will be an API release with 100% feature parity and no changes from the merchant’s perspective ?
The original post saying existing collections and newly created collection will be migrated on July to the new system, It will keep working as usual and we can keep using the existing Graphql queries/mutations and it will work seamless with existing collection that have been migrated and any new collections they create after the release?
The worrying part is this:
Update your app to 2026-07 and adopt the sources model before the merchant rollout in the coming weeks, so you stay in sync with every collection merchants create.
Will they be able to create multi sources collections already? In this case will the sorting work well for that as well?
We’re still gradually rolling out the beta flag for storefront support, so give us a few more days for full availability.
The experience you will see: the collection only surfaces the included variants with their respective swatches, price ranges, and filters scoped to those variants. No theme changes required on your end.
The webhook topic names and trigger conditions are not changing in this release. collections/create, collections/update, and collections/delete fire on the same events as before.
Nothing changes on sorting mutations — collectionReorderProducts and all sort order options (manual, best selling, etc.) continue to work exactly as they do today.
To preempt the obvious follow-up: you can still customize product order within the new system. Manual reordering still works. What you can’t do is set a different sort order per source when a collection has multiple sources — the sort is shared across all members.
Integrating with variants is great. The only problem is the short deadline to do it. Our app took as a fundamental assumption that the product is the unit of work for collections. Adding a second unit of work on the variant level might cause troubles at many levels that will require a good deal of engineering.
I was discussing with another partner today and we agreed that we would like to be aware of what is changing at least two releases ahead of time. So it would be ideal if that change was announced for 2026-10 instead of just two weeks before - and even more ideal if we heard of it via a roadmap even earlier!
We had different plans for the next week and we will have to dedicate it to this update instead
