How to Push Sold-Out Products to the Bottom of Collections on Shopify (2026)
You don’t always want to hide sold-out products. Sometimes you just want them out of the way. Leaving them on the page has real upsides: shoppers can see you carry the item, they can sign up to be notified when it’s back, and the product URL keeps its SEO equity. You just want those products at the bottom of the collection, so the first thing customers see is something they can actually buy.
So how do you push sold-out products to the bottom of a Shopify collection? There are three real options: Shopify’s built-in sorting, a Liquid code workaround, and an automated app. Here are the honest trade-offs of each.
Why pushing down beats hiding for most stores
Hiding out-of-stock products (setting them to draft or filtering them out with collection conditions) makes them vanish entirely. That solves the immediate eyesore, but it costs you:
- You lose SEO equity. A drafted product returns a 404, and pulling it from a collection breaks internal links. We go deeper on this in how out-of-stock products hurt your SEO.
- You lose the demand signal. Customers can’t sign up to be notified, and they can’t even see that you normally stock the item.
- You lose merchandising control. When the product comes back in stock, you have to surface it again by hand.
Pushing the product to the bottom keeps the URL live and the product discoverable, while making sure shoppers see in-stock items first. When shoppers hit a product that’s out of stock, around 30% leave to look elsewhere, so lead with products they can buy.
Method 1: Shopify’s built-in collection sorting
The first place merchants look is Collections → Sort. Shopify offers Best Selling, Alphabetical, Price, Date, and Manual.
But none of them sort by inventory status. There is no native “in-stock first” option. You can drag products around under the “Manual” sort, but the moment inventory changes you’re back to reordering by hand.
Pros:
- Free, built in, no apps
- Fine for a small catalog you rarely touch
Cons:
- No automatic in-stock-first sorting exists natively
- Manual reordering doesn’t scale and breaks the instant stock changes
- “Best Selling” often floats popular-but-sold-out items right back to the top
Verdict: There’s no native setting that does this automatically. For the full rundown of every sort option and its limits, see our Shopify collection sorting guide.
Method 2: Sort by availability with Liquid code
If you have a developer and a custom theme, you can split products by availability at render time:
{% assign in_stock = collection.products | where: "available", true %}
{% assign out_of_stock = collection.products | where: "available", false %}
{% for product in in_stock %}
{% render 'product-card', product: product %}
{% endfor %}
{% for product in out_of_stock %}
{% render 'product-card', product: product %}
{% endfor %}This looks clean, but it has a deal-breaking flaw on real stores: pagination. Shopify paginates the collection before Liquid renders the page, using the original sort order. So on a collection with more than one page of products, sold-out items still show up on page 1 — your Liquid only reorders the items already on the current page, not the whole collection. This exact limitation is a recurring complaint in the Shopify developer forums.
Pros:
- Free if you can write Liquid
- Full control over the logic
Cons:
- Breaks across pagination — sold-out items still appear on early pages
- Display-only — the real collection order in Shopify’s API and admin is unchanged
- Re-breaks on every theme update, and conflicts with AJAX filtering
- Adds render-time work that can slow large collection pages
Verdict: A fragile workaround, not a real fix. The pagination problem alone disqualifies it for any store with more than a page of products per collection.
Method 3: Automate it with Pushy (recommended)
Pushy is built for exactly this. It changes the actual collection sort order in Shopify, pushing out-of-stock products to the bottom and putting them back where they were once they’re restocked.
Setup takes about two minutes
- Install Pushy from the Shopify App Store.
- Open the app in your Shopify admin to see all your collections.
- Pick the collections to manage — one, several, or all of them.
- Toggle auto-push on. Pushy immediately scans and re-sorts the selected collections.
- Done. It then monitors inventory and re-sorts automatically whenever stock changes.
Why this approach wins
- It works at the Shopify API level, not in your theme, so the order is correct everywhere, including across pagination. There’s no Liquid to write and nothing to add to your theme, and it runs on any theme.
- Products stay on the page with live URLs and working internal links, so you don’t lose any SEO.
- It re-sorts within moments of an inventory change, with an hourly sync as a backstop so nothing slips through.
- When an item is restocked, it goes back to its original position, so your curated order stays intact.
- You can exclude products by tag to keep specific items pinned no matter their stock.
- It’s free for up to 5 collections; paid plans run $3.99 to $14.99 a month.
Which method should you use?
| Method | SEO Safe | Handles Pagination | Automatic | Effort | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built-in sorting | Neutral | N/A (no inventory sort) | No | High (manual) | Tiny, static catalogs |
| Liquid code | Display only | No | Partial | High | Devs with custom themes, single-page collections |
| Pushy | Yes | Yes | Yes | Minimal | Most Shopify stores |
For nearly every store, automating it with Pushy is the only option that survives pagination, scales with your catalog, and doesn’t cost you SEO. See how it stacks up against other apps in our out-of-stock app comparison.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can Shopify sort out-of-stock products to the bottom automatically?
Not natively. Shopify's built-in sort options (Best Selling, Price, Date, Manual) don't account for inventory status, and "Best Selling" often pushes sold-out bestsellers back to the top. You need either custom Liquid code or an app like Pushy to sort in-stock products first.
Does pushing products down hurt SEO?
No. It's the SEO-safe option. The product stays in the collection with a live URL and intact internal links. That's the opposite of drafting or filtering products out, both of which lose SEO equity.
Why do sold-out products still show on page 1 with my Liquid code?
Because Shopify paginates the collection using the original sort order before your Liquid runs. Your code only reorders the products already on the current page. The fix is to change the real collection order at the API level, which is what Pushy does.
What happens when a product is restocked?
Pushy moves it back to its original position in the collection automatically, so your curated order is preserved without any manual work.
Will it work with my theme?
Yes. Pushy works at the Shopify API level, so it's compatible with every theme and requires no code changes.
Get started
Stop letting sold-out products take the best spots on your collection pages. Install Pushy for free and let in-stock products lead every collection, automatically.