Collections

Litestore gives you three ways to group products, and each one does a different job. This page explains collections and shows when to use a category or a tag instead.

A category is the place in the tree where a product belongs. A collection is a group you put together yourself for a drop or a campaign. A tag describes a trait that can apply to products in any category or collection.

Categories and collections each get a storefront page with its own SEO fields and translations. Tags don't get a page.

In the database, Litestore stores the three groupings in these records:

Category
Collection
CollectionProduct
Tag

Categories give the store its structure

Breadcrumbs, the storefront category pages and search all read from the category tree.

A product needs a category before you can publish it. Of the three groupings, the tree is the only one you can't skip.

Collections are what you assemble

To create a collection, pick a type and give it a name, description, icon and priority. Then add products to it.

You can choose from four types:

Simple
Bundle
Lookbook
Smart

In every type, you add the products by hand and put them in order by hand.

Inside a collection, products appear in the order you gave them. Litestore orders the collections themselves by their priority.

Bundles sell as one add

Bundle is the only type that works differently.

A Bundle collection stores how many of each product it contains. Its storefront page has a single button 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. Litestore doesn't fill a Smart collection automatically, though. You add its products by hand, exactly as you would for a Simple one.

Publish now or schedule it

Turn on the Published switch, and the collection goes live.

You can set a date instead. Every five minutes, a task publishes the scheduled collections whose time has passed. It runs the same check as the switch, so a schedule can't publish a collection that the switch would have refused.

You can cancel a schedule before it runs.

What else a collection can do

Besides having its own storefront page, a collection can be used by other features. You can use a collection to do these things:

scope a discount to its products
back a product feed

Tags are the cross-cut

Storefront search and the related-products list both use tags.

Tags don't have a page of their own. That is the practical difference between tagging a group of products and putting them in a collection.

Renaming

When you rename a category or collection, Litestore redirects the old URL to the current one. You keep the links that customers and search engines already have.

These pages are not built from blocks

Category and collection pages are storefront pages in their own right. You don't build them from blocks. On these pages you control the copy, icon, SEO fields and product order.

You use blocks to build the home page and standalone pages. The Categories and Collections blocks only show these groups on such a page. They link to the category and collection pages, and they don't build them.

Which grouping to use

Import or build the category tree once, and give every product a category. The tree gives your store its structure, and Litestore requires it.

Create a collection when you want a page to send people to, such as a drop, a bundle or a campaign. Add the products and order them by hand, because every type works that way.

Tag products for the traits the tree doesn't cover. Search and related products will use those tags.

It helps to think about what a customer can reach:

A product belongs in a category, a collection is a page you put together, and a tag is a trait without a page.