[products] inside product page not sorting

We are trying to use a [products] shortcode to list a group of products on another product page, wanting to sort them by menu_order. If I put the shortcode in a regular page it works fine, if I fire it in php via do_shortcode() it works fine. However, when I insert the code in the description of a WooCommerce product, it seems to only use the default name sort, ignoring whatever option I give it (title, date, menu_order) or ascending/descending. It does respect some args in the shortcode, like if I specify number of columns, but not not the order or orderby.