Collections

Collections is a powerful product management feature, offering a way to assign products to:

• Categories
• Price Groups
• Availability Groups
• Multi Domain stores

Collections expands on the previous manual product assignment for these features, by introducing filter based logic. You can build a collection of products using almost any logic. For example:

• Price is less than $100
• Product Name includes "Outdoor"
• Product Code includes "ABCDE"
• Product Custom Field "Manufacturer" = Vandelay Industries

As well as any combination of the logic examples above. For instance:

• Price is less than $100 and Custom Field "Manufacturer"="Vandelay Industries".

Collections really work well for stores that are updated frequently or have data integrations with external systems. Categories, Price Groups and Availability groups become so much more useful when they can automatically populate from Collections based on custom field values or other data points.

Rebuild Frequency

Once created, a collection can optionally track product changes and include/exclude products as they change. You have three options:Immediate, Scheduled and Manual.

Immediate : Collections are maintained "actively." Added products, and all product updates are assessed against collection filters in real time.

Manual : A Collection's content is "static." Nothing changes in the collection unless you manually rebuild the contents by selecting it in the Collections Batch List and clicking the Rebuild Collection button . This setting is appropriate if you want more control over the timing of collection updates.

Scheduled : For extremely large catalogs, or for catalogs with very large numbers of collections, where product updates are extremely frequent, Immediate collections rebuilding may be resource intensive. Scheduled Rebuilds allow you to still enjoy automatic updating, but push them to e.g. a nightly update out of hours.

This can be handled by Scheduled Tasks , which will rebuild the all collections that have the same “rebuild key” which is configured within the task.

From the start, the admin creates a single scheduled task, named “Daily Collection Rebuild,” which runs once a day with a rebuild key of “daily.”

You are free to choose any rebuild key, and rebuild schedule, to meet the needs of your store. You will, however, have to configure the scheduled tasks for them.

Collection Filters - Building Collections Using Filters

Collections supports a very user friendly interface to allow powerful logic-based product groupings using a variety of methods. The process is:

• Use the filter builder to select products matching specific criteria.
• Optionally, manually add additional specific products to the collection
• Optionally, manually exclude products even though they match the filters

Filter-Based Inclusion Using Automatic Filters

Automatic filters are very powerful, and can be used to select products based on:

• A single filter match
• Where one filter match and another filter match, both match
• Where either one filter matches or another filter matches

In addition, a collection can combine the results of multiple Automatic Filters.

At every step, as you build and change filters, a "Collection Summary" is displayed in real time showing you the number of products matching the current collection filters.

Filters based on custom fields will be significantly slower, and less efficient, than those based on primary product fields.

Filters using “any” or “or” will also likely result in slower performance. In addition, Immediate filter evaluations will scale, relative to the number of downstream assignment/un-assignment operations performed for each product. For example, a site with filters for 10 collections, each assigning one product to one price group, and 1 collection, assigning 1 product to 10 price groups will perform similarly.

Manual Assignments

Collections with Automatic Filters can be fine tuned using the Edit Assignments button which allows you to:

• Exclude products that have matched automatic filters.
• Include products that have not matched automatic filters

The Assignment dialog is similar to lists in other parts of the admin, offering the same functionality, allowing you to search for products or use filters to show and hide products, e.g. Assigned vs. Unassigned.

How to Use Collections

Collections open up a new world of active product assignments. The power of Miva Price Groups and Availability Groups is unparallelled in ecommerce. The number of ways these can be used is endless, but until now the challenge has been manually assigning products to them. Leverage the power of collections tied to naming conventions or custom fields to make these features "just work."

Assign a Collection to a Category

In Catalog>Categories , when you click on any category a new Collections tab allows you to assign and unassign collections to a category.

Assign a Collection to a Price Group

Navigate to Marketing>Price Groups . In the Price Groups batch list, select a Price Group to edit. Next, click the More icon (three dots), which shows a new Qualifying Collections option in the drop down.

Assign a Collection to an Availability Group

Navigate to Customers>Availability Groups . In the batch list, select the group you wish to assign a collection to. Then click the Collections button to assign a collection to the group.

Assign a Collection to a Multi-Domain Store

Navigate to Catalog>Multi-Domain . On the page that opens, select a Multi-Domain store from the Domain drop down. Click the Collections tab , choose the Collection , then click the Assign Collection button .