Write Shopify Collection Descriptions Using AI

When any collection is created in Shopify—whether you're setting up a smart collection with automated product rules or a custom collection where you manually add products—this trigger captures the collection details including the title and ID. The trigger watches your store continuously and passes the collection data to the next step immediately after creation. The trigger automatically connects to your Shopify store once you authorize MESA, with no manual configuration needed.

The step retrieves the full collection details using the collection ID from the trigger. Most importantly, it identifies whether this is a "smart" collection (uses rules to automatically include products) or a "custom" collection (products manually added). This collection type information gets used in the next step to route the workflow down the correct path, since Shopify requires different API calls to update each collection type.

The step compares the collection type from Step 2 against the value "smart." If they match exactly, the workflow continues down this path to the AI prompt and smart collection update steps. If they don't match (meaning it's a custom collection), this path stops and the workflow routes to Path 2 instead. This is a hard-coded filter checking specifically for "smart" collection type—no configuration needed.

The AI receives the collection title and generates a 1-2 paragraph description formatted in clean HTML paragraph tags. The prompt instructs the AI to avoid bold text, highlighting, and code formatting markers, ensuring the output is clean HTML ready to display on your store. The temperature is set to 0.5 for a balance between creativity and consistency—high enough to create natural-sounding copy but controlled enough to stay focused and professional. You can customize the prompt to add specific instructions like mentioning your brand name, including keywords, or matching a particular tone of voice.

The step uses Shopify's smart collections API endpoint to update the collection identified in Step 1, specifically updating the "body_html" field with the AI response from the previous step. The body_html field is what displays as the main description text on your collection page in your theme. This automatically publishes the description to your live store, so customers and search engines see it immediately.

The step compares the collection type from Step 2 against the value "custom." If they match exactly, the workflow continues down this path to the AI prompt and custom collection update steps. If they don't match (meaning it was a smart collection that already went down Path 1), this path stops. This ensures each collection only gets one description generated through the appropriate path. This is a hard-coded filter checking specifically for "custom" collection type—no configuration needed.

The AI receives the collection title and generates a 1-2 paragraph description formatted in clean HTML paragraph tags, identical to the smart collection prompt in Step 5. The prompt instructions and temperature setting (0.5) are the same, ensuring consistent description quality regardless of collection type. You can customize this prompt independently if you want different description styles for custom versus smart collections, or keep them identical for consistency.

The step uses Shopify's custom collections API endpoint to update the collection identified in Step 1, specifically updating the "body_html" field with the AI response from the previous step. This uses a different API endpoint than the smart collection update (Step 6) because Shopify requires separate endpoints for each collection type, which is why the workflow needed the Paths branching structure. The description automatically publishes to your live store immediately.