Feed

A feed shows shoppers an endless stream of products that changes order over time. Use one when you want a browsing page where returning visitors keep seeing different products.

A feed is a saved choice of products plus a way to order them. You create it under Storefront → Feed and show it by adding a Product Feed block to a page. The block loads more products as the shopper scrolls. Litestore changes the order every five minutes, so returning shoppers see a different arrangement.

The list at Storefront → Feed always has an "All Products" feed. If you delete it, Litestore creates it again.

How the order rotates

5 minutes   one window
16          orderings to draw from
~80 minutes a full cycle

Each five-minute window picks one of sixteen orderings. Sixteen windows of five minutes add up to the eighty-minute cycle.

The order depends on the time, not on who is looking.

The whole design rests on this. If Litestore ordered products for each visitor, every visitor would get a different page. A page that differs for every visitor can't be cached, so every shopper would wait while Litestore built the catalog for them.

Because the order depends only on the time, everyone who visits in the same window sees the same order. One cached copy serves all of them. Your store gets variety and speed together instead of giving up one for the other.

For shoppers, the result is simple. Someone who visits on Monday and again on Thursday won't see the same eight products in the same places.

Anchors

Rotation doesn't shuffle everything.

With the ordered strategies, the first eight products stay in place. Litestore calls them anchors. Only the products after them rotate.

positions 1–8    anchors, held in place
position 9+      rotated by the window

Featured First would be pointless if the featured products moved every five minutes. Anchors keep the merchandising choice you made, and the products further down still get their share of attention.

Random is the exception. It rotates every product, anchors included, because there's no ordering choice to keep.

When rotation switches off

If a shopper sorts or filters with a Filter block, Litestore turns rotation off completely. The shopper gets exactly the order they chose.

A shopper who picked "price, low to high" has told you the order they want. Rotating it would ignore a direct request for the sake of merchandising.

Defining a feed

1. Open Storefront → Feed. Create a feed, or open the "All Products" feed that's already there.
2. Choose the products. Link the feed to a collection, or leave it on the whole catalog.
3. Pick the ordering. Choose Featured First, New Arrivals, Bestsellers, On Sale or Random.
4. Set the scope. Choose Global, or pick one market.
5. Decide on repeats. Turn on "Repeat products with different photos" if a product should appear again further down with another image. Set the density to Low, Medium or High to control how often this happens.
6. Choose how discounts show on the product card: None, Badge or Price.
7. Leave the feed Active.

One option needs a note. On Sale only shows products whose sale price is active right now. It doesn't just sort on a flag. If a product is marked as on sale but its sale period has ended, it isn't in the feed. The stream can't advertise a discount that checkout won't give.

If a page points at a feed that is missing or inactive, Litestore doesn't show the stream at all. It won't fill the space with random products. You'll notice an empty section and fix it, but you might never notice a section that quietly shows the wrong products.

The stream shows products only. Variants never get their own tile, so a shirt in six colours appears as one card, not six.

Placing it on a page

Add a Product Feed block to one of a page's rows and point it at the feed.

The feed page at this address isn't special:

/feed

It's an ordinary page with a Product Feed block in its rows. Any page can have one, and /feed can't do anything the others can't.

Page size and depth

Each load brings in twenty products.

Shoppers can keep scrolling until they've seen every product that belongs in the feed. Litestore doesn't stop them after a certain number of pages, so even a large catalog is fully reachable.

Choosing what to build

If you want a general place to browse, use one feed for the whole catalog and let the rotation do the merchandising.

If a section has a clear subject, link the feed to a collection. Category pages, seasonal rows and campaign landing pages are good examples.

If the same catalog should be ordered differently in different countries, scope the feed to a market. Otherwise, leave it Global.

Turn on photo repeats when your products have several good photos and the stream is long enough that a second look helps. Leave them off if shoppers can see your whole catalog in one scroll.

If you're tempted to fix the whole order in place, remember what you lose:

Use anchors for the choices you want kept. Let the rest rotate, because in a fixed order the products at the bottom are never seen.

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