Smart collections/categories like Shopify

Hey @samysalahgad, Thanks for starting this discussion!

To be honest, I wasn’t aware of Shopify’s smart collections feature. After looking into it briefly, I see it’s a way to automatically organize products based on specific conditions or rules. For example, you can create a smart collection that automatically includes all products with a particular tag or all items that are on sale.

Have you tried using the “Product Collection block” in WooCommerce (see documentation)? It covers most of the functionality of smart collections, and since it’s part of the WooCommerce core, it’s actively maintained.

Let me give you a quick overview of the Product Collection block. When you add this block to your page, it allows you to select a core collection (see screenshot below):

• Featured Products
• New Arrivals
• On Sale Products
• Best Sellers
• Top Rated Products
• Hand-Picked Products
• Related Products
• Upsells
• Cross-Sells

You can also click on “create your own” button to create your own custom collection. There are settings/filters in the sidebar that allow you to apply filters on products that will be included in this collection. Some of the settings are:

• Product categories (single or multiple categories)
• Product tags (single or multiple tags)
• Product attributes (like color, size, etc.)
• Price range (min and max price)
• Stock status (in stock, out of stock etc.)
• Featured status (yes/no)
• On sale status (yes/no)
• Keyword (search by product title or description)
• Created (like last 7 days, last 30 days, etc.)
• etc.

You can also save these custom collections as patterns or sync patterns. This way, once you have created a custom collection, you can use it on multiple pages.

Extensibility

The Product Collection block’s functionality can be extended further. We have a documentation page that explains how to register custom collections. Building new custom collections is straightforward. We’re actively improving the block’s extensibility so that any functionality not supported in the core can be achieved through custom collections. For example, Product Recommendations uses these extensibility features to add the following custom collections to the Product Collection block:

• Recently Viewed
• Viewed but not Purchased
• Frequently Bought Together
• Others Also Bought

Final thoughts

I believe this will covers most of your desired use cases. Is there any specific functionality you need that isn’t currently supported by the Product Collection block? We’re actively improving this block, and your feedback would be invaluable.

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by Manish Menaria.

But Can this totally replace Woocommerce categories?

It can only replace anything used to show list/grid of Products but not “Woocommerce categories”. You may read this post for more info.

We have a “Category Collection” block in our roadmap and hope to start working on it soon. This will cover all use cases for displaying categories. However, I cannot provide an ETA for it.