Shopify has two collection types, custom and smart, where custom collections are manually populated and smart collections are populated using rules.

Smart collections are incredibly useful, however, they have a limitation of only allowing AND style filters. For example Product Type = X AND Price > 50. You cannot specify Product Type = X OR Product Type = Y.

This is where Power Tools Smarter Collections can help.

Note: Shopify has now added support for OR style queries. If you require NOT functionality, or to aggregate collections then Smarter Collections are still very useful.

Smarter Collections allow you to join different collections together, as well as exclude other collections to create the product list.

To create a Smarter Collection go to the View All collections menu item, then press New Collection.

The "Smarter" collection type will be the default option for new collections.

If you already have a collection with the correct title and handle you can convert it into a Smarter Collection.

Go to the Collections menu item, find the collection, and click on the type. This will bring up the convert collection menu.

Select "Smarter", then click on "Update Collection Type". This will queue a job to convert the collection. Once the job is done you will need to edit the products.

Go to Collections menu and find the collection you want to edit, you can search with your browser's search function (Ctrl+F on windows, Cmd+F on Mac)

Then click the "View Products" icon.

You can now search for and select the collections you want to include and/or exclude.

Press "Save Smarter Collections" when you are done.

As an example, if you wanted to create the collection listed above you could use the following:

Firstly you would need a collection of Product Type = X, and another of Product Type = Y.

Once you have both of these collections you can create a new collection in Power Tools, or even convert an existing collection.

Pressing the Edit Products button on the Power Tool collection list for your collection will display the edit Smarter Collection page.

From here you can select your two collections to join. Press Save and you're done.

Smart Collections also allow you to exclude products based on a collection.

Taking the example above, we may want to exclude any products that are over $100.

Firstly create a new Smart Collection called Over $100, with the criteria of Price > 100.

Go to the Smart Collection by clicking on the Edit Products link on the collection in Power Tools.

Add the Over $100 collection to the list of excluded. Press save and your collection will update.

It may seem like a bit of work to create these extra collections, however, you can avoid much of this by using the Easy Collections feature to create collections for each product type and vendor.