Collections

Standard collections

If you want to group together a number of products and to have complete control over which products are included, then a *standard collection* is probably what you are looking for. You can pick any number of products to be included in the collection when you create it, and any time you need to make a change you just need to come back to the *Collections tab* and add or remove whichever products you want.

There is one standard collection called _frontpage_ which is included automatically when you create your shop. Most themes, as you may have guessed, include this collection on the front page of your shop. It's easy to include products in the frontpage collection because there is a checkbox shown for exactly that purpose when you are "editing a product's details".

Here are some other ideas for standard collections that you could put together:

• Staff Favorites: each of your staff members can select a few products that they think are _particularly_ cool to showcase for your customers.
• "Living Room", "Bathroom", "Kitchen": a home furnishing shop could organize its products by room in addition to product type.
• "PS3", "XBox 360", "Wii"': if you are selling video games and accessories, then your customers will probably be interested in browsing for only a single system at a time.

Super Collections

These are collections which are filled with products based on simple rules that you define, but the best part about them is that you never need to worry about updating them with new products: unless you want to change the collection's rules, you can just "set it and forget it."

Super collections can be extremely useful in a variety of different situations. Here are just a few:

• Stocking Stuffers": Product price is less than 20.00.
• Don't delay! Buy now!: Inventory stock is less than 10.
• On Sale: this is a great way of easily putting products on sale and making sure your customers know about it. First, make a smart collection with a single criteria: Compare at price is greater than 0. Then for any product you want to put on sale, just change the product price to whatever you want and put the original in the compare at price field.

Automatic collections

Automatic collections are created by the Spiffy Store Software for every product type and product vendor that you define. You don't need to do anything extra to create these collections: The sore software does it for you. With most "store themes", customers will be able to view these collections by following the type and vendor links shown on the product pages.

Displaying your collections

Your customers need a way of seeing your collections. The easiest way to showcase a collection is to make a link to it using the "Navigation tab". If you ever decide to delete your collection, any links created in this way will automatically be removed as well.

Can I link to a collection from within one of my blogs or pages?

If you have lots of collections, you may run into a problem if you link to all of them from your main menu: your store's interface could easily get very cluttered, especially if your "theme" is not specifically built with this in mind.

One option is to move most collection links into "pages" which themselves are linked from the main menu. See the "Blogs and Pages help" for more information on including links in this way.

What about tags?

As you start adding products to your store, you might wonder about when you should use a tag to describe something and when you should rely on a collection instead. There are no hard and fast rules about this, but there are a few things you should keep in mind.

For any collection which you've made accessible through your store's interface, your customers will be able to see a list of tags they can select in order to filter that list. If all of your shirts are in the "shirts" collection and you've given them all a "shirt" tag, it could be a bit redundant: your customers will find the option to limit their view of your shirts by only looking at the ones that are, in fact...shirts.

Just put yourself in the customer's shoes and think about what kinds of tags would be most helpful in narrowing your search when you arrive at a collection. Your choice of tags will guide your choice of visible collections, and vice versa.