Hybrid Collections

Planera Hybrid Collections are for the moments when Shopify's built-in collection rules are not quite enough.

You keep the flexibility of a manual Shopify collection, but Planera helps decide which products belong there based on your rules. Weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, gross profit, ABC class, restock date, tag sets, metafields, thresholds, and grouped AND/OR conditions can all become part of how a collection is built.

Think of it as a manual collection whose product list can be refreshed from Planera rules.

That makes Hybrid useful when Shopify smart collections are too limited, but rebuilding product groups by hand is not a good use of time.

When to use Hybrid Collections

Use Hybrid Collections when you want Planera to help manage which products belong in a manual collection.

Good examples:

• A weekly best-performers collection based on recent sales.
• A rising-products collection based on growth trends, not just total sales.
• A restocked-and-selling collection for products restocked recently and already getting new sales.
• A high-margin collection built from gross profit, stock status, and selected tags.
• A collection that combines several rule groups, such as "all of these performance rules" plus "any of these tag sets."
• A collection that Shopify smart collection rules cannot express cleanly.

Hybrid Collections are not a replacement for every manual collection. They are best when the products in the collection should follow rules and be refreshed by Planera.

How Hybrid Collections work

Hybrid works on top of Shopify manual collections.

You define rules in Planera. When you sync the collection, Planera finds matching products from synced catalog data and updates the product list in the Shopify manual collection.

Planera is designed to keep Hybrid Collections in sync efficiently, including larger collections where unnecessary product changes would slow things down or create extra Shopify work.

This gives you more control than a standard smart collection while still keeping the collection inside Shopify.

How to set it up

1. Go to Collections and open the manual collection you want Planera to manage.
2. Enable Hybrid for that collection.
3. Build the rules with concrete thresholds and groups. For example: products must be in stock, revenue in the last 30 days must be greater than a chosen amount, sales growth in the last 7 days must be positive, and tag must be one of premium, new, or editor-pick.
4. Add optional limits when the collection should only contain the strongest matches, such as the top 48 products sorted by 30-day revenue, 7-day growth, gross profit, restock date, or a selected metafield.
5. Review the matching products so the collection looks right before applying it.
6. Sync the collection so Planera can update Shopify with the generated product list. After that, Planera can refresh the collection at the app's configured sync time, once or multiple times per day depending on the plan and settings.

What to expect

Because Planera manages the products in a Hybrid Collection, manual product edits made directly in Shopify may be overwritten the next time Planera syncs that collection.

That is expected behavior. Hybrid means Planera is responsible for deciding which products belong in the collection based on the rules you saved.

If you want to hand-manage the product list in Shopify, keep the collection as a regular manual collection instead of using Hybrid.

The first time Hybrid rules are applied to a manual collection, Planera stores the collection's existing product list as a short-term safety backup when there are products to save. This gives you a fallback if you enable Hybrid and then decide the original manual product list was better.

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Alt text: Hybrid Collection rules generating a product list for a manual Shopify collection.

Capture or design idea: Show rules on the left, matching product cards in the middle, and a Shopify manual collection on the right. The visual should make it clear that Planera decides which products belong in the collection from rules.

Key details

• Hybrid Collections are Planera-managed Shopify manual collections.
• Hybrid is a final product term in Planera.
• Hybrid does not apply to Shopify smart collections.
• Hybrid uses rules based on synced product data, including signals such as weekly sales, monthly sales, growth trends, gross profit, ABC class, restock date, tag sets, and metafields.
• Hybrid supports grouped AND/OR style condition logic.
• Hybrid supports thresholds, tag "is one of" and "is not one of" rules, and optional top-N limits sorted by a selected field.
• Clicking Sync applies the latest Hybrid rules to the collection.
• Daily sync can also refresh Hybrid Collections.
• Planera stores a short-term safety backup of the manual collection's product list the first time Hybrid rules are applied, when there are products to save.
• Manual product edits made directly in Shopify may be overwritten by the next Hybrid sync.
• Use a regular manual collection when the merchant wants to manage the product list by hand.