Shopify can't export your collections — here's how to get them out.
Let your agent work across all your spreadsheets for you.
Unlike products, Shopify has no native collection export at all. There's no button in the admin that hands you your collections as a file, and the "Collection" column you've seen in the products CSV won't help — it only works on the way in. This page explains why, and points you at a one-click export that pulls both your manual and smart collections into a spreadsheet.
Get your collections as a file
Importable fills the gap Shopify left: it runs a live export from inside your Shopify admin and pulls every collection — manual and smart — with titles, handles, descriptions, and each smart collection's rules. No upload, nothing to map; it reads your store directly.
Export your collections in Importable →
Collections is the first entity on the export screen — pick CSV or Excel and download. Free · no signup.
There is genuinely no native collection export
This isn't a hidden setting or a permissions issue. Shopify's admin lets you export products, orders, and customers to CSV, but it offers no export for collections — smart or manual. The list of collections you see in the admin is the only view; there's no "Export" action behind it. If your premise when you landed here was "surely there's a native way," the honest answer is no, and everything below is about the ways around it.
The "Collection" column is a one-way street
The products CSV does have a Collection column, and it's easy to assume it round-trips. It
doesn't. That column is import-only: on the way in it assigns products to a manual
collection, but it is dropped from the products export — you'll never see it in a file Shopify gives you.
And it only ever referred to manual collections: smart collections, which are defined by rules rather than a
fixed product list, were never expressible in that column at all.
Manual and smart collections both need to come out
A complete export has to handle two different shapes. Manual collections are a curated list — title, handle, description, image, and their hand-picked membership. Smart collections carry no fixed list; they're a set of conditions (tag equals, price greater than, vendor is), and those rules are the thing you actually need exported — a membership snapshot alone loses how the collection is defined. An export that only dumps titles isn't an export you can rebuild from.
A reviewed export, run in your own admin
The export runs inside the Importable app in your Shopify admin, reading your store over the live API and handing you a file to download. It never writes back to your store, and there's nothing to upload here — the button above opens the export screen with Collections already selected.
Automating the pull instead of clicking? Install xlsx-for-ai and let your agent take a collection export and reshape, translate, or re-import it over MCP.