Collections
Collections are a flexible way to group products for merchandising purposes. While categories serve as the fundamental organizational structure of Product Catalog, they might not always reflect the ideal grouping of products for display on a storefront. Using collections, you can aggregate products from one or more categories and apply attribute value rules to further refine your curated list. Collections update automatically, indicating that you need not refresh or re-run them to have an accurate list of products reflected. After the rules for a collection are defined, the Product Catalog will automatically update product assignments whenever the catalog is refreshed.
Use Case
A furniture store has products assigned to categories for beds, tables, and sofas. Individual products within those categories share similar attributes, such as the manufacturer or style. Using collections, they can target these attributes to create storefront navigation or to run a sale. For example, a page on the storefront could showcase items from all categories made by a specific manufacturer, or there could be a sale on sectional sofas.
Taking the example of a sale on sectional sofas, let’s add the condition that leather sofas aren’t eligible.
Now let’s assume that the merchant set up product attributes for all their sofas, including a style attribute they use to differentiate standard sofas, sleeper sofas, and sectional sofas. Additionally, they have a material attribute that they use to differentiate fabric, vinyl, and leather. All the sofa styles into one broad “sofas” category.
The basic collection workflow consists of adding categories that contain the products you want in the collection. Then, using the filters in the Attributes & Values field, refining which products in those categories are included or excluded by their attributes. This is done by setting validation rules, such as Includes, Is greater than, or Is exact match.
In this case, creating the collection to support this sale would only require one category, the “sofas” category.
The validation rules require two filters. The first tells the collection to exclude all sofas styles except those with the attribute “sectional.”
The second filter tells the collection to exclude any sofa that had a material attribute of “leather.”
Understanding Attributes & Values is crucial for setting up effective collections. By configuring the Select attribute, Select validation, and Value fields, you can specify the exact conditions that trigger an alert.
Related Topics
Was this page helpful?