Collection filters

The filter sidebar is how shoppers get from “every Magic card you stock” to “blue rares from Bloomburrow under $5, in stock, near mint.” For a card store it’s the single most important piece of the storefront — and it’s also the place where the Sideboard app and the theme meet, which makes it the most confusing thing to set up if you don’t know how the pieces fit. This page is the full picture.

The short version

• The theme can power the sidebar from two different systems: Sideboard filters (built from your live Sideboard inventory, configured in the Sideboard app) or Shopify’s Search & Discovery filters (Shopify’s own filtering, configured in the Search & Discovery app). You can also turn filters off.
• You pick a store-wide default in Theme settings → Collection filters → Filter source, and you can override it per collection template — so singles can use Sideboard filters while sealed product uses something simpler.
• The deciding question is what’s in the collection. Sideboard filters work on inventory Sideboard manages — for now, products it doesn’t manage (store merch, snacks, supplies you track only in Shopify) don’t appear in Sideboard-filtered results. Card inventory → Sideboard filters. Non-Sideboard products → Search & Discovery or No filters on that collection’s template.

What shoppers see

Whichever source you choose, the experience has the same shape: a sidebar of filter groups (a drawer on mobile), checkboxes with counts, a price control, active-filter pills above the grid with an ✕ to remove each one, and a grid that updates in place — no page reload. Sorting and pagination work on the filtered results.

With Sideboard filters the sidebar is card-aware: game, rarity, set, color (or inks, aspects, domains — whatever the game calls it), mana value, condition, finish, an In Stock toggle, and price with quick-pick buttons. Counts are live and specific to the collection being viewed.

Choosing a filter source

Start from what the collection holds. Sideboard filters are built entirely from the inventory Sideboard manages — your card singles and sealed product synced from the app. Products Sideboard doesn’t manage (store merch, snacks, playmats you track only in Shopify) have no Sideboard inventory behind them, so for now they won’t show up in Sideboard-filtered results at all. For those collections, use Search & Discovery (Shopify-native, works on any product) or No filters — set per template, so the rest of the store keeps Sideboard filters (see Different filters on different collections).

Set the default in the theme editor: gear icon → Collection filters → Filter source.

Use Sideboard filters for your card inventory — that’s what it’s for. Use Search & Discovery on collections of products Sideboard doesn’t manage, or on a store that doesn’t use the Sideboard app. Use No filters for small, focused collections where a sidebar is clutter.

Sideboard filters

How it works

When a shopper opens a collection, the theme asks the Sideboard app for that collection’s sidebar. The app answers from your Sideboard inventory — not from Shopify — so the counts mean something concrete: “Rare (42)” means 42 in-stock listings of Rare cards in this collection. A listing is one card in one condition and finish, so a card you stock in Near Mint and Lightly Played counts as two. The headline above the grid (“1,889 for sale”) is the same number the facets add up to.

Everything narrows together, like any good faceted search: pick Blue, and every other group’s counts update to show what you’d get. The In Stock toggle is on by default; unchecking it widens the whole sidebar — counts, price, everything — to include sold-out listings, and the headline switches from “for sale” to “results.”

Because the grid is also served from the same matched set, filtering keeps working on collections of any size — including past 5,000 products, where Shopify’s own filtering shuts off.

The flip side: the matched set only contains what Sideboard knows. A product in the collection that Sideboard doesn’t manage — merch, accessories, anything you stock only in Shopify — isn’t in that set, so it won’t appear in Sideboard-filtered results. Keep those on a template that uses Search & Discovery or no filters.

Setting it up

1. Make sure your Shopify store is connected to Sideboard and your products are synced. The filter data rides along with the product sync — there’s nothing separate to enable.
2. In the theme editor, set Theme settings → Collection filters → Filter source to Sideboard filters.
3. Configure which facets appear: in your Shopify admin, open Apps → Sideboard → Filters.

The Filters screen

This screen (in the Sideboard app inside Shopify admin) decides what the sidebar offers. In Stock and Price are always shown; everything else is yours to build:

• Quick add — one click adds a game’s recommended filter set (rarity, set, color, condition, and so on, tuned per game). Start here; fine-tune after.
• Your filters — the facets you’ve added, in the order shoppers see them. Drag to reorder. Click one to edit:
  • Label — rename it (“Colour” instead of “Color”, say).
  • Enabled — turn it off without deleting it.
  • Conditions — show the facet only when it’s relevant, e.g. only when the collection contains Magic cards. A facet with no conditions always shows (when it has anything to count).
  • Order values by — By results (most first), A–Z, or Custom order, which lists the facet’s values by name so you can drag them into exactly the order you want (Near Mint first in Condition, say).
• Add a filter — pick from every attribute Sideboard knows for your games: shared ones like condition, finish, language, edition, and per-game ones like mana value, aspects, inks, domains, power, HP.
• Price — toggle the quick-pick price buttons, cap how many show, and choose where the boundaries come from:
  • Smart (default) — sensible per-game price tiers. Card prices are extremely bottom-heavy, so these are curated cut points, not equal slices.
  • Dynamic — boundaries computed from the prices actually in the collection being viewed.
  • Custom — type your own boundaries in USD.

You don’t manage the values inside a facet — those come from your actual inventory. If you don’t stock any Mythics, Mythic doesn’t appear; when you stock one, it does.

Collections

Create and manage collections in Shopify exactly as you normally would — manual or automated, it doesn’t matter. Sideboard notices new and changed collections automatically and keeps its own copy of each collection’s membership so it can scope the counts. A brand-new collection may take a little while to be picked up; until then the sidebar falls back to store-wide counts rather than failing, and corrects itself once the collection syncs.

Good to know

• Changes take a few minutes to appear. The sidebar is cached for five minutes per view, and inventory changes that alter filter data (a card going in or out of stock) sync in the background. Don’t expect a just-received card to show in the counts the same second.
• Counts describe cards you’ve carried. A catalog card you’ve never stocked has no listings, so it’s invisible to the sidebar even though the product exists in Shopify at zero quantity. With In Stock unchecked on a very broad collection, the grid can therefore show a few more products than the counts describe.
• If the Sideboard app can’t be reached, the sidebar simply doesn’t render — the collection stays browsable with sorting and pagination, and recovers on its own.
• Sideboard adds hidden tags to the products it manages. The sync stamps each product with machine-managed, namespaced tags (game:mtg, colors:Green, rarities:rare, and so on) that keep the sidebar, the products, and filter links in lockstep — they’re generated from the same data the counts use, so they can’t drift apart. Leave them alone: don’t edit or delete them, and don’t build your own tags in that key:value shape. Your regular tags are untouched and stay yours (they’re also what Search & Discovery tag filters use).

Search & Discovery filters

In this mode the theme renders exactly the filters you configure in Shopify’s Search & Discovery app — the standard Shopify storefront filtering that most themes use. The theme dresses it in the same presentation as the Sideboard sidebar — drawer, pills, no-reload updates, the dual-handle price slider, and the “show more” cap with a search box on long facets — but the filtering logic, options, and counts are all Shopify’s. The one visible difference: no quick-pick price buttons, because Shopify doesn’t provide the price data needed to count them.

Setting it up

1. Install the free Shopify Search & Discovery app if you haven’t.
2. In it, go to Filters and add the filters you want — availability, price, your own product tags (which you can group into named filters), vendor, product type, variant options, or metafields.
3. In the theme editor, set Filter source to Search & Discovery filters.

Good to know

• No filters configured, no sidebar. Search & Discovery filters are set up once for the whole storefront (not per collection). If none are configured in the app, the theme hides the sidebar and shows a full-width grid rather than dead controls.
• The 5,000-product limit is Shopify’s. On collections past ~5,000 products Shopify disables storefront filtering entirely, and the sidebar disappears. If your all-singles collection is bigger than that, this mode can’t filter it — use Sideboard filters.
• Options with no matches are hidden by default (matching the Sideboard sidebar). If you’d rather show them greyed out — so shoppers can see what a selection excluded — switch Options with no matches in Theme settings → Collection filters. Counts come from Shopify.

Different filters on different collections

The Filter source in theme settings is the store-wide default, but the collection section has its own Filter source setting that can override it per template. That’s how you run, say, Sideboard filters on singles and no filters on a small accessories collection:

1. In the theme editor, open a collection page and use the template dropdown at the top to Create template (e.g. “sealed”). See Working with Sections.
2. On the new template, select the Collection grid section and set its Filter source — Theme default, Sideboard filters, Search & Discovery filters, or No filters.
3. In your Shopify admin, open each collection that should use it and set its Theme template to the new template.

Collections you don’t reassign keep the default template and the theme-wide setting. A handful of templates (“singles”, “sealed”, “accessories”) covers most stores.

The settings involved

Troubleshooting

The sidebar isn’t showing at all. Check, in order: the section’s Enable filtering toggle is on; the effective Filter source (theme setting, or the template’s override) isn’t “No filters”; in Search & Discovery mode, that the S&D app actually has filters configured and the collection is under 5,000 products; in Sideboard mode, that your Shopify store is connected to Sideboard.

A facet I configured isn’t appearing. Sideboard facets only show when they have something to count in the current collection — check the facet’s Conditions on the Filters screen, and remember that with In Stock on, a facet whose only matching cards are sold out won’t show. If it’s disabled on the Filters screen, enable it.

Checking a filter doesn’t change the products (Search & Discovery mode). The matching filter must exist in the Search & Discovery app — the theme can only render what Shopify honors. Re-check the app’s Filters screen.

The counts look wrong. Sideboard counts in-stock listings, not products — one card in three conditions is three. If a number seems stale, give it a few minutes (five-minute cache) or check the collection recently changed and is still being picked up.

Products are missing from a Sideboard-filtered collection. Sideboard filters only surface inventory Sideboard manages. Merch, accessories, or anything you stock only in Shopify won’t appear in Sideboard-filtered results — move those collections to a template that uses Search & Discovery or no filters (see Different filters on different collections).

Filters vanished on a huge collection (Search & Discovery mode). That’s Shopify’s ~5,000-product filtering cap. Switch that collection (or the whole store) to Sideboard filters.

What’s next

• Theme settings — the Collection filters group and everything else store-wide
• Collection grid section — the section that hosts the sidebar
• Shopify setup — connecting your store to Sideboard
• Working with Sections — templates and per-collection layouts

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