Sort your list the way you walk the store

You type items into a list in the order they pop into your head. You walk the store in a fixed physical path. Those two orders almost never match — and the gap is paid for in backtracking.

Bananas at the top, then dish soap, then bread, then the milk you remembered late. Walk that list straight down and you've gone Fruits & Vegetables → Household → Bakery → Dairy & Eggs — criss-crossing the whole store and doubling back on yourself the entire trip. A list sorted by "the order I thought of things" makes you re-walk the store every single trip.

Listo has had a sort menu for a while — by name, by when you added each item, by shop. Useful, but none of those match your feet. So I leaned on the two modes that do: Category and Manual.

Group by category — but in your order

Switch Settings → Sort items by → Category and your list collapses into the sections of a supermarket: Fruits & Vegetables, Dairy & Eggs, Bakery, Pantry, Frozen, and so on — sixteen of them. Everything that belongs together shows up together.

That alone helps. But the part that actually kills the backtracking is one screen deeper: Customize category order. Drag the categories into the sequence you physically walk. If fruit and veg are right inside the door and frozen is the last aisle before the till, put Fruits & Vegetables first and Frozen last. Now the list reads top-to-bottom in the exact order you fill the cart.

Open Settings → Sort items by and choose Category.
Tap Customize category order and drag the sections to match your store's layout — entrance at the top, checkout at the bottom.
Go shopping. Work straight down the list. You never double back, because the list bends to your route instead of the other way around.

You don't tag anything. Listo recognizes most items on its own — type "milk" and it lands under Dairy & Eggs, "bananas" under Fruits & Vegetables — from a built-in dictionary that ships in your language. If it ever guesses wrong, correct it once and it remembers your choice from then on. No setup wizard, no "please categorize your 40 items" chore before the feature does anything useful.

Inside each category, the order is still sensible: anything you've marked high-priority floats to the top of its section, and if you've turned on Move bought items to end, the things already in your cart drop to the bottom so what's left to grab stays up top.

The best sort order is the one that matches your feet, not the alphabet.

When your store doesn't fit any tidy logic: Manual

Some stores just don't map to clean categories — a corner shop, a market, the one supermarket near me that puts bread in two completely different places for reasons I've stopped trying to understand. For those, switch Sort items by → Manual. A drag handle appears on the right of every item, and you slide them into whatever exact order you want.

The thing I like most about Manual mode is what happens after you set it: the order syncs. To your other devices, and to everyone the list is shared with. If you and your partner shop the same store together, you arrange the list once and you're both reading the same sequence — no "wait, where are you on the list?" over the phone.

Why there's no pop-up nagging you to do this

I deliberately didn't bolt a "Categorize your items!" banner or a row of badges onto the app. Categorization just happens quietly in the background; the order is a setting you adjust once and forget. A feature that makes your trip smoother shouldn't cost you a tutorial every time you open a list. If you never touch the sort menu, Listo still works exactly as it always did — this is here for the trip you take fifty times a year, not the one you take once.

All of this is free

Sorting, categories, custom category order, manual reorder, sync to shared lists — none of it is behind the subscription. (The only paid piece of Listo is receipt scanning, because every scan costs me a real per-image API call. Sorting costs nothing to run, so it costs you nothing.)

List in "thought-of" order

Bananas, soap, bread, milk — scattered
Cross the store, double back
Miss the item you scrolled past
Re-read the whole list per aisle

List in your store's order

Sections match the aisles you pass
One straight pass, entrance to till
Bought items drop out of the way
Same order for whoever you shop with

Try it

Open your most-used list, set Sort items by → Category, then spend one minute in Customize category order dragging the sections to match the store you shop at most. The next trip will tell you instantly whether it matches your route — and if a category sits in the wrong spot, drag it and try again.

If your store has a layout that no order seems to capture, or an item keeps landing in the wrong category, email me at support@rolisto.com. The category dictionary grows from exactly those messages. I still read every one.

— Andrei