Shopify Product Sorting: How to Display Products in the Right Order

The Products Customers See First Are the Products That Sell

Product order is not a neutral choice. The products at the top of your collection page get disproportionately more clicks, more views, and more sales than those further down. When your default sort order puts your least popular, out-of-season, or low-margin products at the top, you’re actively suppressing your store’s conversion rate — every single day.

Most Shopify merchants set up their collection sort order during store setup and never think about it again. The default “Featured” sort order, driven by the manual arrangement of products within collections, often degrades over time as new products are added without updating the ordering logic. What started as a deliberate arrangement becomes random noise.

This guide covers how Shopify’s sorting system works, which sort orders perform best for different types of stores, how to give customers useful sorting controls, and how to use automated sorting rules to keep your best products visible without manual effort.

Shopify’s Built-In Sort Orders

Shopify provides the following default sort options for collection pages:

• Featured: Manual ordering set by you in the collection editor, or inherited from the product’s position in the collection.
• Best selling: Sorted by historical sales volume, highest first. This is Shopify’s “popularity” signal.
• Alphabetical A-Z / Z-A: Products sorted by title.
• Price: Low to High / High to Low: Sorted by variant price.
• Date: New to Old / Old to New: Sorted by product created date.

Each of these serves different customer intents. The question is which to set as your default, and which to surface in the customer-facing sort control.

Which Default Sort Order Converts Best?

The evidence from ecommerce platforms consistently points to Best Selling as the highest-converting default sort order for most general retail stores. It surfaces your most proven products first — the products that have demonstrated customer approval through actual purchase behaviour. New visitors see your best offerings immediately, which builds confidence and increases add-to-cart rates.

However, “Best Selling” has a known weakness: it creates a self-reinforcing loop where already popular products stay popular because they’re always shown first, while new products never get the visibility needed to build a sales history. This is particularly problematic for fashion stores launching seasonal collections.

For fashion and trend-driven stores, New to Old or a hybrid of new products blended with best sellers is often the better default. Customers in fashion categories expect to see what’s new — that’s frequently their primary motivation for visiting.

For discount and price-sensitive categories, Price: Low to High as a default can improve conversion by immediately signalling value. Customers who are price-led appreciate this transparency.

Setting Sort Orders in Shopify

To set the default sort order for a collection, navigate to your Shopify admin, go to Products → Collections, and open the collection you want to configure. In the “Sort” section, use the dropdown to choose your default sort order.

For the “Featured” sort order, you can manually drag-and-drop products within the collection editor to arrange them exactly as you want. This is time-intensive for large collections but gives you complete control.

Shopify doesn’t natively support automated sorting rules (e.g., “always show new products for the first 14 days, then fall back to best-selling”). For this level of sophistication, you’ll need a third-party app. Kimonix is the most advanced Shopify collection sorting app — it supports multi-criteria automated sorting, inventory-aware sorting (to avoid promoting low-stock products), and A/B testing of sort orders. It’s particularly valuable for high-SKU stores where manual ordering is impractical.

Customer-Facing Sort Controls

Beyond your default sort order, you need to think about which sort options to expose to customers in the sort dropdown on your collection page. Including every available sort option creates a long dropdown that most customers ignore. Curating the list to the most useful options creates a cleaner interface.

Recommended options for most stores: Best Selling, New Arrivals, Price: Low to High, Price: High to Low. Alphabetical sorting is rarely useful for customers (nobody browses a collection looking for products starting with a particular letter) and can often be removed from the customer-facing sort control without any negative impact.

Hiding Out-of-Stock Products

One of the most impactful changes you can make to collection page performance is ensuring out-of-stock products are pushed to the bottom of the sort order or hidden entirely. Nothing deflates a browsing session faster than clicking on a product and finding it’s unavailable — and then scrolling back up to continue shopping with reduced confidence in the collection.

Shopify doesn’t natively push out-of-stock products to the bottom of collections. Some themes handle this with JavaScript that reorders products on page load. The more robust solution is automated collection sorting that deprioritises zero-inventory products. Kimonix and similar apps handle this natively.

At a minimum, ensure your product cards visually indicate when items are out of stock (greyed out, “Sold Out” badge) so customers can make an informed choice without clicking through. This reduces wasted clicks and frustration.

Product sorting is one of those quietly high-impact optimisations that doesn’t require a redesign but can meaningfully move your conversion numbers. If you’d like help auditing your collection sort orders and implementing an automated sorting strategy, contact the OneOnic team or explore our Shopify work.