The Scenario
The merchandising director approved 20 new smart collections for the fall catalog. The rules are mapped in an Excel workbook — collection name in column A, rule field in column B (tag, vendor, product type), condition in column C, value in column D. The catalog pages need to pull in products automatically based on those rules starting Monday.
The person who usually configures Shopify collections is on parental leave. You have the workbook. You have admin access. You have 20 collections to create and a weekend before the launch.
The bad version:
- Open Shopify's Collections screen, click Create collection, enter the title, switch to Automated, configure the rule field, set the condition, enter the value, save.
- Go back. Create the next collection.
- 20 times. At roughly 4 minutes each, accounting for the navigation and the field entry.
Monday is three days away. The 80 minutes of admin clicking is the easy part — the risk is misconfiguring a rule on collection 12 and not catching it until a customer sees the wrong products.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the collection rules and creates each Shopify smart collection via the API — titles, rule fields, conditions, values — without touching the admin.
Read my Collection Rules Excel sheet and create Shopify smart collections for all rows where column E is blank — write the new collection ID into column E
What You Get
- A Shopify smart collection created for each row, with the automated rule configured exactly as specified.
- The collection ID written back into column E for each created collection.
- All 20 collections pulling in matching products immediately — no manual product assignment needed.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some collections need two rules — products must match both
Read my Collection Rules Excel sheet and create Shopify smart collections for each row — apply rule 1 from columns B, C, D and rule 2 from columns F, G, H (skip rule 2 if column F is blank) — set disjunctive to false so both rules must match — write the collection ID into column E
Collections already exist from a previous draft run and need to be updated, not duplicated
Read my Collection Rules Excel sheet and create Shopify smart collections for all rows where column E is blank — if a collection with the same title already exists, update its rules instead — write the collection ID into column E
Sort order needs to be set to manual for specific collections flagged in column I
Read my Collection Rules Excel sheet and create Shopify smart collections for each row — set sort_order to 'manual' if column I says 'manual', otherwise set to 'best-selling' — write the collection ID into column E
Two rules per collection, skip existing, set sort order from workbook, write IDs and timestamps
For each row in my Collection Rules Excel sheet where column E is blank, create a Shopify smart collection with title in column A — apply rule 1 from columns B, C, D and rule 2 from columns F, G, H (skip if blank) — if a collection with the same title already exists, skip it and write 'exists' in column E — set sort_order from column I or default to 'best-selling' — write the collection ID and timestamp into columns E and J
Running the duplicate check and rule-2 fallback in one pass means you can re-run the prompt after editing the workbook without creating duplicates.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the collection rules workbook before the fall catalog launch, then ask SheetXAI to create all 20 smart collections in one operation. The next seasonal collection set will use the same workbook structure. Also worth reading: how to bulk add products to custom collections, or the hub overview for all Shopify workflows.