Introduction
Shopify has updated how collections work behind the scenes. A single collection can now combine several kinds of membership at once: rules, hand-picked products, other collections, and even individual variants. For more background on this change, see our blog post on Shopify collection sources.
To match this, Altera now offers a single unified Collections data type for importing and exporting collections. It covers everything a collection can do and will eventually replace the separate Smart collections and Manual collections options.
What changed
Previously you exported collections as either Smart collections (products added automatically by rules) or Manual collections (products added by hand). Those were two separate options on the export screen.
There is now a third option: Collections. A single Collections export includes every collection on your store, whether it uses rules, hand-picked products, or both, and it captures the newer Shopify features that the older formats cannot: excluded products, membership pulled in from other collections, and rules that target individual variants.
The Smart collections and Manual collections options are still available for now, but they cannot represent the newer collection features, so Collections is the recommended way to export collections going forward.
Do my existing files still work?
Yes. The Smart collections and Manual collections formats are still fully supported for importing. You can:
Upload an existing Smart or Manual collection spreadsheet and import it as before.
Keep using
smart_collectionsandmanual_collectionsin the Altera CLI and API.
Nothing you have already built stops working. Over time, Collections will become the single export option, but the existing formats will always be recognized on import.
Exporting only rule-based or hand-picked collections
If you want the equivalent of an old Smart or Manual export, use the Type filter on the Collections export and choose Smart collections (rule-based) or Manual collections (hand-picked). This narrows the export to just those collections while still using the unified format. Choosing Mixed (new-style) does the opposite: it exports only the collections that use the newer features and can't be represented as a plain Smart or Manual collection.
What the format looks like
The Collections sheet uses the same column names and values as Matrixify's Collections sheet, so a file exported by either app imports into the other. A few columns let one collection describe all the parts of its membership:
Source: ID, Source: Type, Source: Title, and Source: Description group the rows that belong to one part of the collection. The type says whether that part is rules and picks on Products or Variants, a set of other Collections, or an App source.
Source: Command lets you replace or delete one source without touching the collection's other sources.
Inclusion: Type marks each rule row as Include or Exclude, and Inclusion: Match says whether a product must match all or any of the rules.
Condition: Field, Condition: Relation, Condition: Value, and Condition: Match describe one rule per row, with the field and relation names spelled the way the Shopify admin spells them. Hand-picked products, variants, and sub-collections are rows with the field Manual Selection.
Condition: Command adds a rule (MERGE) or removes one (DELETE) from an existing source.
Sort: Position, Sort: Product ID, and Sort: Product Handle set the order of products in a manually sorted collection.
Importing a file into an existing collection is additive: rules and products the collection already has are kept, the file's rows add what is missing, and a row marked DELETE removes what it names. See the Collection Fields reference for every column and value.
Files exported with the column names Altera used between July and September 2026 (Source, Source Target, Must Match, Rule: Product Column, Rule: Mode, Product: Handle, and so on) keep importing unchanged.
Good to know
The Sources & Conditions field group holds a collection's full definition: rules, hand-picked products and variants, and sub-collections. The Linked Products group is off by default because it writes one row for every product in the collection; turn it on when you want to reorder a manually sorted collection.
Sub-collections can only be nested one level deep. A collection that pulls its products from other collections cannot itself be used as a sub-collection. This is a Shopify limitation.
A collection cannot reference itself as a sub-collection.
Collections in the same file can reference each other in any row order - a parent collection can appear before the collections it pulls in.