Collections

What is a collection?

A collection is a named group of products. When a customer clicks a navigation link like "Women's Shoes" or "Sale Items", they're browsing a collection. Each collection gets its own URL (e.g. /collections/sale-items), a title, a description, and an optional featured image.

A product can belong to multiple collections at the same time. For example, a blue denim jacket could appear in "Outerwear", "Men's", and "Sale" all at once.

Creating a collection

To create a new collection, go to Admin → Products → Collections and click Create collection.

Title and description

Give the collection a clear, customer-facing title. The title is shown on the collection page heading and in your navigation. The description appears below the heading on the collection page — it's a good place for SEO-relevant copy and to help shoppers understand what they're looking at.

Collection image

You can upload a featured image for the collection. This image is available in themes as collection.image and is typically used on collection listing pages, category cards, and hero banners.

Collection type: manual vs. automatic

CartOS supports two ways to populate a collection with products:

Manual collections let you hand-pick exactly which products are included. Products must be added or removed individually. Manual collections are ideal for curated groupings like "Staff Picks", "Gift Sets", or "New Arrivals" where you want full control over what appears.

Automatic collections use conditions to include products dynamically. Any product that meets the conditions is added automatically — and removed automatically if it no longer qualifies. Conditions can match on:

• Product title (contains, equals, starts with)
• Product type
• Product vendor
• Product tag
• Price (greater than, less than, equals)
• Compare-at price (is set / is not set)
• Inventory stock (greater than, less than)

You can require products to match all conditions or any condition. For example: "type equals Apparel AND tag contains sale" vs. "tag contains sale OR tag contains clearance".

Adding products to a manual collection

In a manual collection, scroll to the Products section and click Browse products or start typing a product name in the search box. Select the products you want to include and click Add. You can also add a product to a collection directly from the product's edit page — scroll to the Collections section and select the collections it should belong to.

Sorting products within a collection

You can control how products appear within a collection using the Sort setting:

• Best selling — products with the most orders appear first.
• Newest — most recently created products first.
• Price: low to high / high to low — sorted by price.
• Alphabetical (A–Z / Z–A) — sorted by product title.
• Manual — you set the order by dragging products in the list.

Shoppers can also re-sort on the collection page using the sort dropdown, if your theme supports it.

Collection URL and handle

When you create a collection, CartOS generates a handle from the title — for example, "Summer Sale" becomes summer-sale and the collection URL becomes yourstore.com/collections/summer-sale. You can edit the handle manually in the SEO section at the bottom of the collection editor, but changing it after the collection is live will break any existing links pointing to the old URL.

SEO settings

Each collection has its own SEO title and meta description, accessible at the bottom of the collection editor. If you leave these blank, CartOS uses the collection title and description as defaults. For important category pages that you expect to rank in search engines, it's worth writing a concise, keyword-rich meta description.

Collections in navigation

Creating a collection doesn't automatically add it to your storefront navigation. To make it browsable, go to Admin → Online Store → Navigation and add a link to your collection in the header or footer menu. You can also link to collections from homepage sections in the Theme Customizer, such as featured collection blocks or category card grids.

Deleting a collection

To delete a collection, open it and click Delete collection at the bottom of the page. Deleting a collection does not delete the products inside it — it only removes the grouping. Any links in your navigation menus pointing to the deleted collection will return a 404, so update your menus first.