Shopify Smart Collections: Confusion, Followed By Resolution

After staring at the screen and saying some inappropriate words for a couple of hours, I learned something new about Shopify’s Smart Collections today: They use the ‘and’ operator, not ‘or’. If you want your products to go into a Smart Collection, you need to target them with specific tags or vendors, not try and lump them all together like I did.

Even as a developer, this had me stumped for some time.

A Concrete Example: Smart Collection Confusion

Let’s pretend we want a Smart Collection called “Blue T-Shirts”.  I wanted to capture all the product tags related to blue T-shirts.  This is what I did:

The product tag is equal to light-blue-shirt + Product tag is equal to dark-blue-shirt

But it produced nothing.  The products didn’t get added to my smart collection, and I was stumped.

Why?  No products will go into your collection, because this tells Shopify

“Give me products that have the product tag ‘light-blue-shirt’ and ‘dark-blue-shirt'”.

There probably won’t be such products in your collection, because a shirt can’t be both light blue and dark blue.  Silly Tristan.

Prior to this experiment, I’d thought it would put both blue-shirt and dark-blue-shirt into the collection, but it doesn’t.

How Do We Solve This?

What we really need for “Blue T-Shirts” is an operator that is both simpler and smarter:

This will catch both dark-blue-shirt and light-blue-shirt.

Is This A Flaw In Shopify’s Design?