🧠 MassCat Tutorial (2025): Bulk Add, Remove or Tag Products in Shopify Manual Collections

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Managing collections manually in Shopify can be time-consuming — especially for large catalogs or frequent updates.

With MassCat, you can add or remove products from Shopify manual collections in bulk, or apply tags to groups of products using smart filters or SKU lists.

Whether you’re prepping for a seasonal sale, cleaning up your catalog, or organizing your store, MassCat helps you do it in seconds.

Let’s walk through the full process 👇

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🔹 Step 1 – Choose the action you want to apply

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When you open MassCat, the first step is to select the type of update you want to perform. You’ll find a dropdown menu in the top right of the screen labeled “Action selected”.

From this menu, you can choose from three powerful bulk actions:

• ✅ Add products to collections – assign selected products to one or more manual collections
• ➖ Remove products from collections – remove selected products from chosen collections
• 🏷 Add tags to products – apply one or multiple tags to products for better organization or automation

This makes MassCat extremely versatile — you can clean, group, and structure your product catalog with just a few clicks.

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🔹 Step 2 – Select the products you want to update

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Next, decide which products the action should apply to. MassCat offers two ways to do this, depending on how precise or broad your targeting needs to be.

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Option A – Filter products by conditions

Use powerful filters to dynamically target products based on multiple attributes, such as:

• Product title
• Product type
• Vendor
• Created date
• Tags
• Price, weight, inventory stock, and more

You can combine multiple conditions with AND (all must be true) or OR logic (any can be true). This makes it easy to apply bulk changes to entire product categories, sale items, or tagged groups.

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Once your conditions are set, click “Preview matched products” to review the selection before proceeding.

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Option B – Select products by SKU, title, or barcode

If you already have a specific list of products to update, you can paste them directly using:

• SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
• Product title
• Barcode

MassCat accepts input either as comma-separated values or one item per line. Once entered, click “Confirm selection” to proceed.

This option is ideal when you’re working with a short, targeted list — for example, when running a flash promotion or uploading a CSV-exported list from Shopify or your ERP.

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🔹 Step 3 – Select the manual collection(s) to update

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Once your product selection is confirmed, it’s time to choose the Shopify collections you want to update. You can do this by typing into the search bar to quickly find collections by name.

MassCat lets you select one or multiple collections simultaneously — for example, “Home page” and “Black Friday” — and shows your selected collections clearly before applying changes.

🛑 Important: Shopify only allows bulk edits to manual collections, not smart collections.

That means:

• ✅ Manual collections (where you manually control product membership) can be updated by MassCat.
• 🚫 Smart collections (also called rule-based collections) cannot be manually edited — Shopify restricts this natively.

Smart collections will appear greyed out in the list and cannot be selected.

If you try to interact with one, MassCat will show a tooltip explaining the limitation and offering an alternative solution.

✅ Pro tip: How to target smart collections anyway

While Shopify blocks direct edits to smart collections, you can still target them indirectly by using product tags.

Here’s how:

1. Use MassCat’s “Add Tag to Products” action to apply a tag (e.g., spring-sale) to your selected products.
2. In your Shopify admin, go to the smart collection’s settings and add a rule like “Product tag is equal to spring-sale”.

This allows you to keep using your smart collection logic — while updating your product group dynamically with MassCat.

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🔹 Step 4 – Start the categorization

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Once your products and collections are selected, review your configuration and click “Start categorization”.

MassCat will immediately apply your chosen action — whether it’s adding products to collections, removing them, or tagging them — and you’ll receive a confirmation message once the operation is complete.

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💡 Popular Use Cases

• Add hundreds of new products to a “Holiday Sale” collection using filters
• Remove out-of-stock items from your “Featured” or “Best Sellers” collection
• Apply tags like clearance, bundle, or vip to segmented products
• Use tags to indirectly manage smart collections via automation
• Quickly categorize new product imports from suppliers or dropshipping feeds

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🚀 Try MassCat Today

MassCat is the fastest way to organize and scale your Shopify store.

It’s perfect for merchants managing large catalogs, agencies, dropshipping stores, and growing brands.

👉 Install MassCat on the Shopify App Store