Welcome back, and I hope you've now had the opportunity to add a few more products to your store,
because what we're going to do now is to group them into collections.
And for my store, that means I'm going to group my two leashes into a leash collection.
I will group my water bottle and my food dispenser into another collection, which I'll probably call
feeders.
I can then have another collection called backpacks.
Okay, it's only got one product in it at the moment, but as I add more products, I would add more
and more products to that collection.
And finally a collection called towels, where of course I'll be putting my luxurious, quick drying
bath towel.
And then all of those collections will be easy to find in the drop down menu, which will show under
catalog.
Now, if all that sounds a little bit confusing, please don't worry because as this lecture progresses,
it's going to become clearer and clearer.
And so let's kick things off by creating my first collection, my Dog Leash collection.
And to do that, I'll go back to admin where you can see I'm already on the products menu item.
And just below that we have collections.
If I click on collections, you in fact see straight away we have one collection already, the home
Page collection.
Now, I would just ask you to ignore this home page collection at the moment, because I'm going to
talk about this in more detail in the next lecture.
And so to create my dog leash collection, what I'll need to do is to come over here to the Create Collection
button and click on it.
And that brings me to the collection template.
So just before I add my first collection, let me just do a quick run through of what this template
is all about.
So first of all, we have the title of the collection itself.
So for example leashes.
I could then describe my collection so I could put something like, we really hope you enjoy our fantastic
collection of dog leashes.
And then to the collection type where you see those two options, manual or automated.
And you can see by default that manual is selected.
And that means that you will manually add products to this collection.
But in the future, let's just say that you want to import a huge number of products into your store,
and it's at that point that you might want to make use of the automated option, because as you can
see, if I scroll down a bit, this option allows me to set rules to easily import products, therefore
avoiding me manually adding every single one.
Now that's sometime in the future, so please don't worry about that right now.
Just ensure that you have manual selected at the bottom.
We have as ever, the search engine listing.
And then over in publishing, you'll want to make sure that the online store is always selected.
So click on manage and just make sure that this is checked on.
I don't need these other two, so I'm actually going to check them off and click on done.
And then to the image.
Now this image would be a generic image that describes your collection.
So in my case a generic image about leashes.
Now I'm not actually going to add an image in for my collection, as I'm sure you get the point.
And I also want to reemphasize at this stage, and I said this before several lectures ago, this whole
course isn't about me building the perfect store for you.
What I'm doing here is giving you all the tools so that you can create a fantastic business.
So I hope that when you're creating your own collections, you'll find a fantastic generic image and
add it in here.
And then for the theme template we will leave it on the default collection as ever.
So now let's go ahead and complete this for my leashes collection.
So going up to the title I will put in leashes.
And then for the description I can put.
We hope you enjoy browsing our fantastic collection of leashes.
Now just a quick tip here.
You want to keep this brief and to the point.
Your objective, after all, is simply to get them browsing and clicking on your products.
And then given that we're going to leave the collection type at manual, and I've already shown you
how to set the sales channels, there is literally nothing else to do.
So we can click on save.
You can see that it's created the leashes collection.
And if I click on collections now, it's added the leashes collection to the list.
So now let me create my second collection which was feeders.
So clicking once again on Create Collection I'll give it the title of feeders.
And then for the description I'll put.
We hope you enjoy browsing our fantastic collection of feeders, which of course is very similar to
the last collection.
Now, I'm not trying to imply that you would put more or less the same sentence every time.
I'm simply keeping this basic for teaching purposes, but I'm sure that you can come up with something
far more imaginative.
Okay, so that's that one done.
So let's click on save once again.
And then I'm going to create the other two collections which were backpacks and towels.
Now I don't think you need to watch me do that again, because I'm sure you now get the idea as to how
easy it is to create a collection.
So I'll see you in a moment once I'm done.
Okay, I'm back and you can now see that I've got all of my collections.
I have towels, backpacks, feeders, leashes, and the home page.
Just to reiterate that I'm going to come back to in the next lecture.
So now what we want to do is to add the appropriate products to each of these collections.
So let's go to the first product.
So clicking on products I have my 3 in 1 water bottle.
So clicking on this, I'm going to scroll down until I see this collections.
And if I click into collections, you can see that the home page is selected by default.
You can leave that as is for the moment.
But what I'll also want to do is to select feeders so that this product goes into the feeders collection.
Coming out of this now, you can see that it's added feeders below the collections itself.
So I'll then click on save and go to the next product.
So for the dog backpack this time I come down to collections and select backpacks.
Click on save for the dog leash.
Of course I'll be adding that to the leashes collection, so clicking on leashes I click on save once
again and then bear with me while I look at the other products.
So for jog with your dog, of course, that's another leash.
So let's select leashes.
Once again, click on save back to the products.
The quick drying bath towel will go into the towels collection.
And finally the super smart food dispenser.
We will also add to the feeders collection.
And so clicking on save for the last time and going back to products, I have now associated all of
my products with the correct collections.
Now you will remember at the beginning of the lecture if I just go back to my store, I said that underneath
the catalog, we want to have a drop down menu with the title of each one of our collections, meaning
that our visitors can easily find our products.
And so to finish everything off, let's now go ahead and actually create that menu.
So going back to admin I'll go down to navigation, which I'm sure you remember is under online store
and navigation.
And actually the first thing I want to do is to change the title of catalog because it's quite boring
and doesn't really do anything for our store.
So instead of catalog, I'm going to change it to our fabulous products.
And to do that I just click into the main menu, click on edit next to catalog, remove the title,
and in its place I'll put our fabulous products and click on Apply Changes.
So now what we're going to do is to create a submenu underneath our fabulous products, which is going
to include all of our collections.
So to do that I'll click on Add Menu Item and I'll put in the first collection which is feeders.
Then clicking into the box below, I can click on collections this time and select feeders.
And then simply click on add.
And then to make this a submenu item underneath our fabulous products, I'll come over here to these
little dots and my cursor changes into a hand, which allows me to pick this up, move it up a little
bit, and just indent it underneath our fabulous products.
And now I can add another menu item, which this time is going to be towels.
So I'll select towels from the collections and click on add.
Do the same thing for leashes.
Click on add once again and then finally for backpacks selecting the backpack collection.
I click on add and that completes my menu.
So now all I need to do is to click on save menu.
And then let's head back to the store for the final test.
So what I'm going to do now is refresh the page.
And I want you to keep your eye on this catalog, because it's going to change to our fabulous products
and create the menu beneath it.
So let me refresh the page and here we go.
Our fabulous products.
And when I click on this little down arrow it opens up my menu with feeders, towels, leashes and backpacks
all clearly laid out.
And if I then go ahead and click on feeders, it shows me the feeder collection where it says, we hope
you enjoy browsing our fantastic collection of feeders.
And then of course includes my two products which are feeders.
If I then go to towels, it shows you my towels.
If I go to leashes, here are my two leashes.
And then of course, finally backpacks.
Everything is now fantastically organized, allowing, as I've said before, my customers to easily
find the products that they're looking for, which ultimately drives sales.
So there we go.
That's how you organize your products into collections.
So I'd really encourage you to do the same for your store.
Now, just to make it really clear that you can't make mistakes or that if you do, they are very,
very easy to fix.
Let's just go back to the collection list and imagine, for example, that you wanted to edit the towels
collection.
Well, all you'd need to do is to click on towels.
That's going to bring you straight back to the collection template, where you can make any changes
that you like.
And if you wanted to get rid of it altogether, you can just scroll down to the bottom here where you
see delete collection.
And don't worry, that's only going to delete the collection.
It's not going to delete the products in the collection itself.
So I sincerely hope you're getting very excited about how your store is really starting to take shape,
because with each passing lecture, I hope you can now really see how we're taking your store to the
next level.