Collections

Litestore groups products with categories, tags and collections, and each one serves a different purpose. Collections suit drops, bundles and campaigns, and a category or a tag fits better in other cases.

Product groupings

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

Category
Collection
CollectionProduct
Tag

Categories

Breadcrumbs, the storefront category pages and search all use the category tree.

A product needs a category before it can be published, which makes the tree the only one of the three groupings that's required.

New collections

Simple
Bundle
Lookbook
Smart

Within a collection, products appear in the order you set. Litestore sorts the collections themselves by their priority.

Bundles

Bundle is the only type that behaves differently from the others.

A Bundle collection stores how many of each product it contains, and its storefront page has a single button that adds the whole bundle to the cart.

Publishing and scheduling

When you turn on the Published switch, the collection goes live immediately.

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

A schedule can be cancelled before it runs.

Other uses

In addition to having its own storefront page, a collection can be used by other features. A discount can be limited to the collection's products, and a product feed can use the collection as its source.

Tags

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

Tags don't have their own page, which is the main practical difference between tagging a group of products and adding them to a collection.

Renaming

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

Category and collection pages

Litestore creates a storefront page for every category and collection, and lists them all at /categories and /collections. You don't create these pages in Storefront → Pages. Instead, you control their copy, icon and product order on the category or collection itself, and the assistant sets their search title and description.

The pages you create in Storefront → Pages are separate. To make one of them show a collection's products, create a feed that draws from the collection and choose that feed for the page.

Quick reference

Import or build the category tree once and give every product a category. The tree defines the store's structure, and Litestore requires it.

Create a collection when you need a page to send people to, such as a drop, a bundle or a campaign. You'll add the products and arrange them by hand, since every collection type works that way.

Use tags for traits that the category tree doesn't cover. Search takes those tags into account.

To summarize, a category is where a product belongs, a collection is a page you put together yourself, and a tag describes a trait and has no page of its own.

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