Collections are a powerful way to organise and display both content and products across your Ecommerce site. Collections give you the freedom to design pages that do more than just display products. They create experiences.

Retailers are already using them to:

• Launch new products with supporting content and lifestyle imagery
• Curate themed ranges like Staff Picks or Gift Ideas
• Turn buying guides into shoppable experiences
• Share brand stories that link straight to relevant products

By combining imagery and videos with text and curated product ranges, you can turn everyday listings into inspiring, purposeful destinations across your site. You can see some examples of live Collections in action on Citrus-Lime Ecommerce sites here.

This article covers the following topics:

• Collection Types
• Creating and Editing Collections
• Adding Items to a Collection
• Removing Items from a Collection in Bulk
• The Collection Homepage
• Managing Collection Tags
• Parent and Child Collections
• Renaming a Collection
• Assigning a Collection to a Find & Filter Landing Page
• Assigning a Collection to the Cart
• Collection Restrictions

Collection Types

Creating and Editing Collections

Creating a New Collection

To create a new Collection, navigate to the Collections page in Cloud MT, found under the Content Management section in the menu:

This page will display a grid with a list of any existing Collections. 

Click the New Collection button in the top left to create a new Collection:

First, choose the type of Collection you would like to create, using the buttons at the top of the screen:

Collection Overview Settings

Once you have selected the type of Collection you wish to create, you will see the following settings:

Images, Content and Advanced Options

The Collection image will be displayed as the header image on the Collection page and as the thumbnail for this Collection on the Collection Homepage.

Adding or Changing an Image: Click the blue icon below the image preview. A window will appear, allowing you to select an image from your existing Image Gallery in Cloud MT or upload a new image.

Removing an Image: Click the “X” button to clear the image assigned to the Collection:

To add editorial content* to the Collection, use the Content editor. Here, you can add text, further images, embedded videos and so forth. If you prefer, you can also create your editorial content in html by clicking the ‘Source code’ button.

Clicking the View Advanced Options dropdown will reveal further SEO options, where you can set the Meta Description and Canonical URL for the Collection:

You will also see the Relationship settings here — please refer to this section for more information.

Ensure you click the Save Collection button each time you have made changes. The button can be found at both the top and bottom of the page when editing a Collection. If you have added items to a Collection, it may take up to 15 minutes before items appear in this Collection on the front end of your Ecommerce site.

Previewing a Collection

Once a Collection has been created and saved, you can preview this on your Ecommerce site by clicking the Preview on Site button at the top of the page. You can preview a Collection before it is active, to ensure you are happy with how it will display. 
You will also be able to view the last date and time when the Collection was modified successfully.

Adding Items to a Collection

You can add items to a Product Collection or Product & Content Collection in three ways:

• by choosing specific products from a list ('Assign Products')
• by choosing products using the Bulk Wizard 
• or by assigning a group of products that match certain facets ('Assign Facets')

Click into the Manage Items tab, and then choose whether you would like to Assign Products or Assign Facets:

Assign Products

Here, you can select individual products for your Collection from a grid of all your Cloud MT items. You can filter and search through the grid using the column headers. 
Each product has an In This Collection checkbox that indicates whether it is part of the Collection already. To add an item to the Collection, simply select the In This Collection checkbox next to the item in the grid. To remove an item, untick the box.

The Bulk Wizard

As an alternative to adding products from ‘Assign Products’, you can use the Bulk Wizard to add items to your Collection. 

In the Cloud MT menu, navigate to Wizards > Bulk Wizards and choose the Add to Collection wizard:

In Step 1 of the wizard, you will filter through a grid of your items in Cloud MT and select which items you wish to add to the Collection.

In Step 2, you will choose which Collection you would like to add the items to. Please note that a Collection must be active before it can be selected here.

In Step 3, you will see a confirmation of the items that have been added to the Collection.

Assign Facets

Here, you can choose up to three facet sets to display products within the Collection. First, click Set Facets:

This will open the Set Facets window. You can now choose any combination of facets you like, to find matching products for your Collection. For example, here we are choosing items where Item Group = ‘Helmets’ and Brand = ‘Met’ and Age = ‘Kids’. Remember that a product must match all of your chosen facets in order to be added to the Collection.
Cloud MT will tell you how many matching products have been found. In the example below, there are 21 active items. 

Click Save to confirm your selection. You will then see the url fragments that match your facets appear in the corresponding field. You can click the icon on the right of the field to preview the matching items on your Ecommerce site.

You can now proceed to choose up to a further two facet sets for your Collection, if needed. For example, I could also choose to add my Kids bikes (by choosing Department = ‘Bikes’ and Age = ‘Kids’, resulting in /bikes/kids) and my Kids clothing up to 20.00 (Department = ‘Clothing’, Age = ‘Kids’ and Max Price = 20, resulting in /clothing/kids?maxprice=20). 

Removing Items from a Collection in Bulk

In the Cloud MT menu, navigate to Wizards > Bulk Wizards and choose the Clear Collection wizard:

In Step 1 of the wizard, you will select the Collection you wish to empty.

In Step 2, you will confirm you definitely want to remove all items from the Collection.

In Step 3, you can click ‘Results’ to see a list of the items that have been removed from the Collection.

The Collection Homepage

The Collection Homepage has the url yoursiteaddress/collections

This page lists all active Collections that have the Show on the Main Collections Page option enabled. If you manage multiple sites, you can choose which site’s Collection Homepage will display the Collection.

When the Show on the Main Collections Page option is disabled, the Collection can still be accessed via its direct url (formed from the Name). You could link this within your Facet Navigation, Banners and/or external marketing.

On the homepage, customers can find relevant Collections by searching for a keyword or filtering by a tag (see below). Customers can choose if they would like to search for Collections matching ‘either’ or ‘all’ of their tag choices.

You can add content to your Collection Homepage from Content Management > Collections > Collection Homepage:

Here, you have the option to add SEO information to your Collection Homepage (Title, H1 and/or Meta Description) and to add some editorial content that will display at the top of the page.

Managing Collection Tags

Once a Collection has been created, you can add tags to further organise and sort your Collections. This helps customers who are browsing your Collection Homepage to find relevant content. When you assign a tag to a collection, it will save automatically – you do not need to click Save Changes.

You will find the Tag settings above the Content editor on each Collection setup page:

Click and type into the search box to add a tag to a Collection. A drop-down will be shown with tags related to your search term. Click a tag to assign it to the Collection:

If the tag does not exist, you can create a new tag by clicking the green Create New Tag + button. The tag will then be available in the drop-down menu, to select and assign to the Collection.

Editing and deleting your Collection Tags is done from the Collection Tags page in Cloud MT. Click the Collection Tags button at the top of the Collections page to navigate here:

The number of Collections allocated with a specific tag is also visible from the grid on this page. Click on Edit in blue to change a tag's name. You can also create new tags on this page, using the blue Create Tag button.

When you delete a tag, it will be removed from all of the Collections it's assigned to. This cannot be undone, so you will see a warning before you confirm:

Parent and Child Collections

Once a Collection has been created, you can assign a relationship to another Collection. This allows you to link your Collections together and serve related content to your customers. Child Collections will appear as related Collections at the bottom of the Parent Collection’s page, displaying the Image, Title, and Short Description:

 You can manage the relationships between your Collections by expanding the View Advanced Options drop-down at the bottom of the Collection settings:

Click View and Manage Child Collections and the ‘Manage Child Collections’ window will open.

Find the Collection that you want to make a Child, and tick the Is Child Collection checkbox next to it. This will make the Collection you're currently editing into a Parent Collection, which means that it cannot be assigned as a Child Collection elsewhere — a Collection cannot be both a Child and a Parent.

Unticking the Is Child Collection checkbox will remove that Child Collection from the Parent.

When a Collection is set as a Parent Collection, the number of Child Collections is displayed in the Relationship section. 
When a Collection is set as a Child Collection, the Relationship section will show the Parent Collection and provide a link to its settings in Cloud MT.

Removing the Parent status will also remove all assigned Children.

Renaming a Collection

When you create a Collection, a URL fragment will be automatically generated from the Collection's Name (it will follow a pattern of /collection/url-fragment). For example, if you name a Collection ‘Wet Weather Gear’, the URL fragment for this Collection will be /collection/wet-weather-gear.

If you make changes to the Name of a Collection, a warning will appear. This is because changing the Name will also change the URL of that page, which can affect its SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) performance. To avoid this, you have the option to create a redirect for the updated Collection URL. To do this, select Click here and then select Create Redirect:

Creating a redirect will navigate users from the old Collection URL to the new URL, minimising the impact to your SEO performance. You can manage your redirects from within the Redirect Manager in Cloud MT. Information on using the Redirect Manager can be found here.

Assigning a Collection to a Find & Filter Landing Page

When a Find & Filter results page is either converted (or forced) to be a Find & Filter Landing Page, you can assign a Collection to appear at the top of the page.

1) To assign a Collection to a Find & Filter Landing Page, navigate to Item Organisation > Find & Filter Landing Pages (or use the link here).

2) Filter for the Landing Page within the Grid, and search for the Collection you would like to add to the page using the drop-down menu, shown below:

3) Once your site cache has updated, the Collection will show at the top of the Landing Page, with an option to ‘View All’ items within the chosen Collection:

Further information on Find & Filter Landing Pages can be found here:

• Cloud MT // Find & Filter Automatic Landing Pages
• Cloud MT // Advanced ALP Creation

Assigning a Collection to the Cart

You now have the option to assign a Product Collection to the cart (or basket) page of your website (the url of this page is yoursiteurl/cart). This gives you a way to cross-promote and upsell products before a customer checks out.

This is called the ‘Essential Items Collection’. It is assigned from Site Management > Site Specific Options in Cloud MT, here:

Navigate to the Essential Items Collection drop-down and filter for your chosen Collection. The drop-down will only display your active Product Only and Product & Content Collections.

Whilst you can assign a Product & Content Collection to the cart page, only the products assigned to the Collection will pull through to the section below the basket — the editorial content will not be shown. 

Collection Restrictions

There are a few restrictions deliberately imposed upon Collections.
This has been done to ensure that you do not accidentally disrupt the integrity of your Citrus-Lime Ecommerce database or cause conflicts between existing Facet URL fragments and the ones you may think to create using Collections.

The following list details the Collection restrictions:

1) You cannot create Collections with the same Name as existing Facets derived from the normal Find & Filter Options (Department + Browse Filters, Product Group + Browse Filters, Activity and Materials).

2) You cannot create Collections with the same Name as existing Facets derived from the Google Categories section (Colour, Gender and Age) or Seasons.

3) You cannot create Find & Filter Navigation Options that combine a Collection with any other option available during the Facet Navigation set-up process.

4) The end user browsing your Ecommerce site cannot view Collections as Filter Options in regular Find & Filter result sets.