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Draft product support

Merchandising rules support draft products, so you can curate collection pages before a product is published. Draft products that belong to a collection appear alongside active products in the merchandising UI and can be pinned, swapped, and reordered like any other product.

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How draft products work in merchandising

When you open a merchandising rule for a collection, the product grid automatically includes any draft products that Shopify has assigned to that collection. Draft products are visually marked with an orange Draft badge so you can distinguish them from published products at a glance. You can:
  • Pin draft products to specific positions in the collection
  • Swap a draft product into a slot using the swap popover — draft products appear in search results alongside published products
  • Reorder draft products by dragging them to a new position

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Pin protection for draft products

Pins on draft products are protected from automatic cleanup. The platform’s background processes that remove pins for unsearchable or sold-out products skip draft products entirely. This means your merchandising layout stays intact while a product is in draft, and the pins take effect as soon as the product is published.
Draft product merchandising only affects the Layers dashboard. Draft products are never returned in customer-facing search or browse results until Shopify publishes them.

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Disabling variant breakouts

Merchandising rules include an option to disable variant breakouts for a collection when the rule is active. This allows you to override the default variant breakout behavior configured for a collection. When you enable the Disable Variant Breakouts option on a merchandising rule:
  • Variant breakouts will not be applied to the collection while this rule is active
  • Products will display as standard product tiles instead of individual variant tiles
  • This override only applies when this specific rule is the active rule for the collection
This is useful when you want to temporarily disable variant breakouts for specific merchandising campaigns or contexts without modifying your global variant breakout configuration. Use cases:
  • Promotional campaigns where you want to show products as single tiles for cleaner presentation
  • Contextual merchandising where certain audiences should see products instead of variants
  • Scheduled events where variant breakouts should be disabled during specific time windows
The Disable Variant Breakouts option only appears in the merchandising rule form when the target collection has variant breakouts configured. If no variant breakouts exist for the collection, this option is not shown.
See Variant Breakouts for more information on how variant breakouts work and how merchandising rules can override them.

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Product filtering

The merchandising interface includes a search bar in the toolbar that lets you quickly filter products while arranging your collection. Type a keyword to narrow the product grid to matching items — pinned products always remain visible so you can see the full merchandising context.

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How filtering works

The filter matches against multiple product fields at once:
  • Title and handle
  • Vendor and product type
  • Tags
  • Variant title and SKU
  • Configured attributes defined in your grid settings
Results update instantly as you type. A counter next to the search bar shows how many unpinned products match out of the total, so you can gauge the scope of your filter at a glance.

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Behavior while filtering

  • Pinned products stay visible. Regardless of the search term, all pinned items remain in the grid so you never lose sight of your merchandising anchors.
  • Drag-and-drop is disabled. Reordering is temporarily turned off while a filter is active to prevent accidental position changes on a partial list. Clear the search to resume dragging.
  • Shift-click selection respects the filter. When you shift-click to select a range of products, only the visible (filtered) items are included in the range.
Click the clear button or use the Escape key to reset the filter and return to the full product list.

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When to use filtering

  • Large collections — Quickly locate a specific product in a collection with hundreds of items so you can pin or inspect it.
  • Vendor or brand audits — Filter by vendor to review how a particular brand is represented in the collection.
  • SKU lookup — Search by SKU to find the exact variant you need to pin.
  • Tag-based review — Filter by tag (e.g., “sale” or “new-arrival”) to see which tagged products are in the collection before creating expressions.

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See also