Collections
Learn how collections, categories, and tags differ — the four collection types, scheduled publishing, and what each one is used for.
Litestore has three ways of grouping products, and they do not overlap.
Categories are the tree a product lives in. Collections are groups you assemble for a drop or a campaign. Tags are traits that cut across both.
Categories and collections each get a storefront page with their own SEO fields and translations. Tags do not.
The records behind the three are:
Category
Collection
CollectionProduct
TagCategories give the store its structure
The category tree is what breadcrumbs, the storefront category pages and search read from.
A product needs a category before it can be published, which makes the tree the one grouping you cannot skip.
Collections are what you assemble
Pick a type, give the collection a name, description, icon and priority, and add products to it.
There are four types:
Simple
Bundle
Lookbook
SmartProducts are added by hand and ordered by hand, in every one of them.
Within a collection, products sit in the manual position you gave them. The collections themselves are ordered by priority.
Bundles sell as one add
Bundle is the only type that behaves differently.
A Bundle collection stores how many of each product it contains, and its storefront page offers a single control that adds the whole bundle to the cart.
A Smart collection is a label, not a rule
Smart is one of the four types you can choose and it shows as a badge in the collections table, but nothing populates a Smart collection automatically. Its products are added by hand, exactly like a Simple one.
Publish now or schedule it
Flip the Published switch, and the collection is live.
Or set a date instead. A task runs every five minutes and publishes scheduled collections once their time has passed, subject to the same check as the manual switch — a schedule cannot publish something the switch would have refused.
You can cancel a schedule before it fires.
What else a collection can do
Beyond its own storefront page, a collection is a handle other features take hold of. It can:
- scope a discount to its products
- back a product feed
Tags are the cross-cut
Tags feed storefront search and related-product scoring.
They do not have a page of their own, which is the practical difference between tagging a group and collecting one.
Renaming
Old category and collection URLs redirect to the current one, so a rename does not cost you the links customers and search engines already hold.
These pages are not built from blocks
Category and collection pages are their own storefront pages, not block layouts. You control the copy, icon, SEO fields and product ordering on them.
Blocks compose the home page and standalone pages. The Categories and Collections blocks only place these groups onto one — they are a way of pointing at the pages, not a way of building them.
Which grouping to use
Import or build the category tree once, and give every product a category. That is structure, and it is required.
Create a collection when you want a page to send people to — a drop, a bundle, a campaign. Add and order its products by hand, because every type works that way.
Tag products for the traits the tree does not cover, and let search and related products pick them up.
The three are easiest to keep straight by what a customer can reach:
A category is where a product lives, a collection is a page you assembled, and a tag is a trait with no page at all.
Related
Products
Learn how product options generate the variant grid, what the publish gate requires, and how add-on and related links work.
Blocks
Learn how the ten block types compose a storefront page in rows of up to three columns, and how the draft-then-publish layout editor works.
SEO
Learn about the SEO checklist at Insights → SEO, the schema.org markup on product and article pages, generated sitemaps, and the slug history that keeps renamed URLs alive.