Planera Install on Shopify

Advanced Sort

Shopify's built-in sort options are useful: manual order, best selling, alphabetical, price, and creation date.

Planera Advanced Sort is for collection merchandising that needs more flexibility than one standard sort can provide.

A high-SKU Shopify store may need to sort products by recent sales, stock status, discounts, product tags, newness, growth trends, aging inventory, or selected metafields. A merchandising team may also want to shuffle top best-selling products, shuffle all products, group products by tags, or rotate featured products when the sort runs.

Advanced Sort helps automate product ordering so collections stay intentional as products, inventory, discounts, and sales performance change.

For stores with active merchandising, it reduces repetitive manual reordering while giving teams more control over what shoppers see first.

Why this matters

Collection order affects what shoppers notice first.

A bestseller collection should usually show strong performers, but not if the best performers are out of stock. A sale collection should show discounted products quickly. New products can stay pinned near the top for 7 days, or any number of days that fits the store. A homepage featured collection should not look frozen for weeks.

Manual ordering can work for small or rarely changed collections. But in a fast-moving catalog, product order can become stale quickly as inventory, discounts, and sales performance change.

Advanced Sort gives teams a way to organize collections with sorting rules instead of constant manual dragging. The result is storefront merchandising that feels more active, controlled, and responsive.

How Advanced Sort works

Advanced Sort uses synced product information, sales data, and the sorting logic you choose.

Depending on your setup, Planera can sort products by:

Planera calculates the product order and applies it to the Shopify collection.

In Planera, Advanced Sort can be used as a permanent collection sorting strategy. It can also be used in a Campaign when the collection order should change for a specific period: sale, launch, season, or promo window.

Advanced Sort ideas

Use Advanced Sort when the same collection should stay organized, fresh, and commercially useful as products and sales change.

Bestseller with stock protection

Sort products by recent sales, but push sold-out products lower in the collection.

Why it works: shoppers still see strong performers first, but unavailable products do not occupy the best positions.

Fresh new arrivals

Bring new products to the top while they are still fresh.

Why it works: new products get early visibility without requiring someone to manually move them every week.

Sale collection with discounted products first

Promote discounted products to the top of a sale collection.

Why it works: shoppers opening a sale collection see relevant sale items immediately.

Shuffle top products

Sort the collection first, then shuffle only the top 8, 12, or 20 products.

Why it works: strong products stay visible, but the first row does not feel locked in place.

Rotate featured products when the sort runs, such as moving the top 4 products through the most visible positions.

Why it works: the homepage can feel fresh after each scheduled update while the collection keeps a controlled structure.

Shuffle all products

Use this when the whole collection can appear in a fresh order.

Example:

Shuffle all products in a large discovery or inspiration collection every week.

Why it works: older products get another chance to be seen, and the collection feels less static.

Group, then sort

Use this when some product groups should appear before others.

Example:

Show products tagged premium first, then new, then clearance, with each group sorted by recent sales.

Why it works: the collection structure stays intentional while performance data still shapes the order inside each group.

How to set it up

  1. Go to Collections and open the collection you want to organize.
  2. Enable Advanced Sort for that collection.
  3. Choose the main sorting direction, such as recent sales, monthly gross profit, newness, price, inventory, tags, or a selected metafield.
  4. Add extra rules such as pushing sold-out products down, pinning new products to the top, promoting discounted products, grouping by tags, shuffle, or rotation.
  5. Review the result and sync the collection to apply the new order. After that, Planera can refresh the order at the app's configured sync time, once or multiple times per day depending on the plan and settings.

What to expect

Advanced Sort works best when product and sales data are synced and up to date. Planera regularly refreshes its product cache with efficient incremental updates, while order and sales analytics are typically updated overnight.

Some sorting strategies are more stable, such as sorting by price, title, or fixed tag groups. Others respond to changing data, such as recent sales, inventory, discounts, newness, or growth trends. Shuffle top # adds controlled variation after sorting; rotation moves featured products through visible positions when the sort runs.

Use stable sorts when the collection needs consistency. Use shuffle or rotation when freshness and product exposure matter more.

If some products are missing a selected value, Planera can still sort the collection where possible. For example, products without a selected metafield or sales value can be placed after products with stronger matching data.

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Suggested image path:

./assets/advanced-sort-builder.png

Alt text:

Advanced Sort builder showing product sorting options such as sales, stock status, discounts, tags, shuffle, rotation, and metafields.

Capture or design idea:

Use a screenshot of the Advanced Sort settings page showing a main sort rule, sold-out handling, discount handling, tag grouping, and shuffle or rotation options. If designing an illustration, show product cards being reordered by sales, stock, tags, and featured product rotation.

Key details