What Is the Inventory by Collections Report?
The Inventory by Collections report groups your current Shopify stock by the custom collections you built, then lists every product and variant inside each one. For each row you see the SKU, vendor, price, current inventory quantity, and inventory cost, so a collection stops being a marketing label and becomes a stock position you can actually read.
This matters because Shopify's native reporting does not give you a stock summary by collection. Your inventory lives at the product and variant level, while your merchandising decisions happen at the collection level. This report closes that gap.
One distinction worth holding onto: the inventory quantity here reflects stock as it stands right now, not a historical count. Treat this as a live review of where your stock sits today, which is exactly what you want before featuring a collection or planning a restock. It is a stock-position report, not a sales report, so it tells you what you are holding, not what has sold.
Which Fields Are Included in the Inventory by Collections Report?
The fields pair each stock figure with enough product context to act on it, so you can tell not just how much is in a collection but which items and vendors sit behind the number.
You can customize the pre-made report by adding, removing, or rearranging fields, and you can pull in any metafield or custom property you already keep in Shopify to match how you review stock.
Important Insights You Can Find in This Report
Which collections have the most capital tied up in stock?
Sort by Inventory Cost and look at where the totals concentrate. A collection carrying a large share of your inventory cost is where your working capital is parked, and if that same collection is slow to sell, that money is sitting still. This is the signal to check turnover before you reorder, or to run a clearance on a group that looks expensive to hold. Reading cost rather than quantity keeps a pile of cheap units from hiding next to a small stack of expensive ones.
Is a collection you are about to promote actually in stock?
Filter to a single collection and read Inventory Quantity across its variants before you feature it. A campaign that drives traffic to a collection missing its key sizes or top variants converts worse and frustrates buyers. Catching a thin variant while there is still lead time to restock is the difference between a launch that sells through and one that sends shoppers to an out-of-stock page.
Where is stock value coming from one vendor inside a collection?
Read Vendor against Inventory Cost within a collection. When most of a collection's held value traces back to a single supplier, that vendor's pricing, lead time, or reliability quietly controls that whole group. That is worth knowing before you lean harder on the collection, because a delay from one vendor can empty it. It also tells you where a supplier negotiation would move the most cost.
THE ANALYST'S READ: The Signal Most Merchants Miss
Watch for a collection that is heavy on Inventory Cost but built from low-priced variants. When the Price column is modest across a collection yet its Inventory Cost total runs high, the value is coming from volume of units rather than expensive items, and deep stock on low-margin products is one of the easier ways to lock up cash without noticing. It may suggest you over-ordered a staple, or that a group meant to be a fast mover has quietly become dead stock. It is worth checking the sell-through on those items before the next purchase order, since the fix is usually to slow reordering rather than to discount. Compare this against a collection with the opposite shape, few units but high cost each, which carries the same capital risk for a very different reason and calls for a different response.
How Can You Automate the Inventory by Collections Report?
Open the pre-made Inventory by Collections template, confirm the columns, and save it. Set a date range or a filter first if you want, such as one collection to review ahead of a launch. From there you can schedule it to email automatically on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to yourself or your operations team, so your stock picture stays current without rebuilding the report. For output, export it as Excel, CSV, or PDF, or push it to Google Sheets or Google Drive.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Inventory by Collections report show?
It shows your current stock grouped by custom collection, with each product and variant inside a collection listed alongside its SKU, vendor, price, inventory quantity, and inventory cost.
Does this report use current stock or historical inventory?
Current stock. The Inventory Quantity reflects what is available right now, so use this as a live stock review rather than a record of past inventory levels.
What is the difference between Inventory Quantity and Inventory Cost?
Inventory Quantity is the count of units available for a variant. Inventory Cost is what those on-hand units are worth at the cost you paid, based on Shopify's per-unit cost, so it measures the capital held rather than the number of items.
How is this different from the Sales by Collections report?
Inventory by Collections shows what you are currently holding in each collection. Sales by Collections shows what each collection has sold over a period. One reads stock position, the other reads revenue, so you use this report to decide what to restock and that one to decide what to promote.
Can a product appear in more than one collection here?
Yes. If a product is assigned to several manual collections, it appears under each of them, so the same variant's stock can show in more than one collection row.