Do New Arrivals Get Buried After 24 Hours? 3 Ways to Keep Fresh Products Visible on Shopify

 “Shopify keeps overriding my sorting!”

Unfortunately, it’s a very common story — especially when adding new SKUs to larger catalogs.

After adding new products, you see a good spike on day one, only to have that product fall further down the collection page. 

You know the real culprit for this lies in your sequencing, and because your theme and Shopify defaults won’t let you mix multiple parameters. 

But, Why Do New Arrivals Really Disappear After 24 Hours on Shopify?

There are a few Shopify merchandising workflows that cause this — and they happen in 99% of stores.

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First, stores don’t use “Newest” as the main sort. 

Most Shopify stores set their main collection pages to Bestselling because it converts better. 

This means that new arrivals must compete against years of accumulated sales history — which they cannot do.

And even if “Newest” is used in one place, the rest of the store uses different logic.

This means a new SKU is visible in one place, but buried everywhere else — which can feel like it disappears after 24 hours.

Your typical setup probably looks like this: 

• New arrivals → sorted by Newest
• Category pages → sorted by Bestselling
• Homepage blocks → sorted by theme-defined priority
• Recommendations → sorted by velocity 
• Search → sorted by relevance and popularity signals

The issue with this: 

• Most shoppers don’t browse the New Arrivals page. They navigate through categories, search, and homepage modules. So, if the new product is only surfaced in a single “New Arrivals” collection, 80%+ of traffic never sees it.

And merchants generally start with “Newest” only during launch before switching back to “Bestselling.”

Because this is the common way to handle new-arrivals merchandising workflows:  

1. When the product launches, you set sort to “Newest” to push the drop 
2. Then, 24–48 hours later, they tend to switch collection back to “Bestselling” for conversions 

The result is what we like to call the “day two cliff.” Visibility (and conversions) to newer SKUs begin to drop. 

Finally, some Shopify themes and apps look like they’re showing new arrivals, but they aren’t, actually.

Because they filter products by a “new” tag, but the internal order is still based on popularity signals like: 

• Sales
• Add-to-carts
• And conversion rate

Not true newness.

Okay, so, what to do? 

There are three ways you can fix this issue: 

1. The Manual Workaround 
2. The AI Merchandising Approach 
3. The Developer Method 

Let’s take a look at each. 

Fix #1: The Manual Workaround 

More often than not, the first workaround your merchandising team will try is manually “fixing” the sorting issues. This means: 

• Dragging new products back to the top every morning 
• Adding “new” tags manually and removing them later
• Rebuilding or duplicating the new-arrivals collections so that new items can be pinned differently

The most common of these manual workarounds is the “Tag and Conditions” hack. 

But more often than not, teams aren’t able to remove tags in time due to heavy admin backlog — especially for stores with 100+ SKUs. 

It also means zero interaction with velocity, margin, stock, or markets.

An alternative, less fragile fix is the “Metafield Score/Spreadsheet” hack.

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The crux of the matter is this: 

• Manual fixes are a good workaround for newer, smaller catalog stores. But it is a resource-draining strategy that always collapses at scale for Shopify retailers with 50+ SKUs who are growing their catalogs. 

Why Manual Fixes Don’t Scale 

Manual fixes break because every change in: 

• Stock 
• Sales velocity
• Or campaign 

...forces someone to have to manually re-order or re-tag products — a workload that grows exponentially as the catalog grows. 

They also can’t react in real-time, so new arrivals lose visibility the moment anything changes in the store.

This is where merchandising automation strategies save the day. 

Fix #2: The AI Merchandising Approach 

We know that static sorting can’t keep new arrivals visible because it doesn't adjust to how products perform or how markets behave. 

Well, AI merchandising is the perfect fix to solve this Shopify sorting problem. Because a great AI merchandising Shopify tool (like Kimonix!) uses real-time data, like: 

• Stock levels
• Margins
• Sales velocity
• And customer behavior

…to dynamically order products across your store, collections, and product recommendations blocks.  

So, instead of relying on one static rule, it applies multiple weighted rules at once and automatically updates product sequencing as conditions change. 

This creates a living ranking system that reacts instantly to things like: 

• Inventory shifts
• Demand patterns
• And campaign priorities

Let’s see how this might look in the real world. 

Intersport DK Sees a 93% Increase in Collection CTRs Using AI-Driven Sorting

Intersport DK's biggest challenge was that their existing single-parameter collection strategy couldn’t factor in pricing, stock, margin, and performance, together. And their manual workarounds were also taking a lot of team time and were never up to date. 

The fix? 

Using our Kimonix AMS (AI Merchandising Strategy) to optimize and automate their primary collection (which had the highest traffic and sales) by dynamically sorting products based on real-time data. This enables them to take into account advanced parameters like: 

• Stock levels
• Margins
• Sales velocity
• Customer behavior

…and more. 

And the results after just one week? 

• Intersport DK’s average collection CTR increased by 93%
• While the price increased by 46%  

Want to duplicate their Shopify sorting strategy for free? 

Request a Demo Here  

Fix #3: The Developer Method 

The last option you have to fix the Shopify “new arrivals” sorting issue is with store-theme customization. This is where you rely on custom code or scripts to force Shopify to sort products the way you want, usually through: 

• Liquid conditions
• Metafields
• Or API-driven reordering 

While these are a viable option, they require ongoing maintenance. And constant changes in: 

• Stock
• Markets
• Themes (updates) 
• Or catalog size

...can break the logic. 

This means you need to depend on developers to adjust or rebuild the rules, which makes the system rigid and slow to react to real-time merchandising needs.

It can also be costly for most Shopify Plus stores. 

TL;DR: It’s Not a Matter of If You Need to Fix This, It’s a Matter of How! 

Now that you have the three fixes out of the dreaded “new arrivals buried after 24 hours” problem — it’s time to choose the best solution for your specific needs. 

1. For stores with much smaller catalogs, the manual fix is a good jumping-off point.
2. While for stores already trying to manage manual workarounds with 100+ SKUs, it’s time to invest in the right collection sorting tool.
3. And if you’re an enterprise Shopify Plus store with a full-time, in-house developer, continued customization with AI merchandising is the right way to go.

But, whichever way you choose, there is no getting around the fact that you need to fix this glitch. 

Because the cost of NOT fixing shopify’s new-arrival sorting glitch is high: 

• All your new SKUs landing at the bottom, unless manually boosted
• New drops losing visibility mid-campaign
• Product recommendations sorting without built-in time-decay logic 
• New SKUs rarely appearing above the fold unless manually or automatically pinned
• Cross-sell widgets surfacing older, higher-velocity items over new arrivals you want to expose
• Paid campaigns pointing to collections where the marketed product is buried too far in the collection 

All of which means bad shopper experience, overstock (and later dead stock) issues, lost revenue, poor ROIs, and, above all, missed profits. 

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