Colin Can Do

Colin's Job Description

Name: Colin is a Collection Merchandising App for Shopify, further referred to as Colin
Department: Merchandising
Reports to: Employer
Employment type: Intern / Part-time / Full-time / Dedicated (underline as needed)
Work location: Shopify powered store

Job summary

Colin looks after product collections.

He keeps collections populated, changes how products are ordered, and runs temporary or recurring merchandising work on schedule.

The employer makes the decisions. Colin carries them out.

Responsibilities

Keep collections populated

Colin can maintain product membership using Populate by Colin.

The employer gives him conditions such as inventory, tags, product data, sales data, metafields, or other available catalog fields. Colin keeps the product set updated with products that match them.

Put products in the right order

Colin can use Advanced Sort to order products using locally synced store data.

He can work with things such as:

Colin can also:

Run Campaigns and Schedules

Colin can make collection changes at a specific date and time, either once or on a repeating schedule.

A Campaign can start once and either stay in place or end later.
A Schedule can repeat work on selected weekdays during a specified time window.

He can report for duty every morning, every weekend, during store hours, or on another repeating schedule chosen by the employer.

Campaigns and Schedules can temporarily change:

When a Campaign has an end, Colin remembers the relevant original state and restores it afterward, provided nobody has changed the same thing in the meantime.

Build collections from the Product Catalog

Colin can use the current Catalog view to create:

Snapshot collections are created once.

Continuously updated collections keep their Colin product set synchronized.

Colin creates these collections unpublished. Publishing remains the merchant’s responsibility.

Maintain Shareable Lists

Colin can create reusable product sets based on Catalog conditions.

A Shareable List can be connected to multiple Shopify collections while Colin maintains its product membership in one place.

Work with other assistants

Colin can provide factual information about collections, Campaigns, settings, plans, activity, and merchandising capabilities to Shopify Sidekick.

He also supports private Agent access for approved changes.

Colin does not let assistants quietly make arbitrary merchandising decisions behind the employer’s back.

Special skills

Colin comes with more than seven years of experience behind his development in Shopify collection merchandising software.

He has access to purpose-built algorithms, local store data, SQL-backed filtering, sorting logic, scheduled workers, and Shopify APIs.

This means Colin does not need to reach for AI every time there is work to do. When regular code can perform a task faster, cheaper, and predictably, that is what he uses.

His particular strengths include:

Working style

Colin is deterministic.

Give him the same collection state, conditions, and sorting instructions, and he follows those instructions rather than improvising a merchandising strategy because an AI model was feeling creative that morning.

He uses regular software, Shopify APIs, synced catalog data, SQL-backed filtering, sorting algorithms, and scheduled workers to do most of the work.

Things Colin will not do

Colin will not publish newly created collections on the merchant’s behalf.

He will not overwrite unrelated Shopify product sources just because he manages another product set in the same collection.

Colin will not silently replace later merchant changes when restoring a Campaign.

And he will not brew coffee, no matter how much you are willing to pay.

Tools provided

Performance expectations

Colin is expected to:

Authority

Colin is responsible for execution.

The employer remains the decision maker.

He can move ten thousand products around a collection if instructed to.

Colin still doesn’t decide what the store should sell.