Featuring Items Online with Collections

Departments and sub departments are how your inventory is organized. Collections are how you merchandise it online — a short, curated row of "Fall Favorites," "This Week's Specials," or "New Arrivals" at the top of your store, built out of items that stay exactly where they are in your department structure.

Nothing about an item's department, sub department, pricing, or reporting changes when you put it in a collection. One item can sit in several collections at once, and you can rotate a collection off the store at the end of the season and bring it back next year with its items still in place.

This guide walks the whole job end to end: creating the collection, filling it, putting it at the top of the store, giving it a picture, and rotating it out. For a field-by-field reference of the Collections table and the Tree view, see Departments, Sub Departments & Brands.

Availability: collections and a VMX-built online store

Collections are part of the standard VMX inventory setup — every store can create them from Inventory → Departments. How collections display to shoppers applies to stores with a VMX-built online store: the featured tiles, the category menu, and the collection pages described on this page are part of that storefront. If VMX does not host your website (for example, you run your own WordPress or Shopify site), collections still exist in the POS but your web team controls what shoppers see. Interested in a VMX-built online store? Contact help@vmxllc.com.

A few of the display behaviors described below are switched on per store by VMX. Those are called out where they come up.

Where a collection shows up on your online store

A collection's placement online is decided by three fields on the collection itself — Parent Collection, Anchored Department, and Anchored Sub. Department — all on Inventory → Departments, in the Collections section:

All three left empty — the collection is a featured collection. It appears as a picture tile in the featured row on your store's home page (usually headed Featured Collections, though some stores use their own wording), and as a top-level entry in the store's category menu alongside your departments. This is the setting you want for a seasonal or weekly feature.
Anchored Department set — the collection appears as a picture tile on that department's page, and in the category menu underneath that department, listed after its sub departments. It behaves like an extra category inside that department. It does not appear in the home page featured row.
Anchored Sub. Department set — the collection appears as a picture tile on that sub department's page. It gets no entry of its own in the category menu, so shoppers reach it by opening the sub department first. It does not appear in the home page featured row.
Parent Collection set — the collection becomes a child of that collection: a picture tile on the parent's page, and an indented entry under the parent in the category menu when the parent is itself a featured (top-level) collection.

Anchoring and parenting change where a collection appears, never what is in it. Anchoring a collection to a department does not pull that department's items into the collection, and it does not restrict which items you can add.

Set only one of the three. A collection that has both a Parent Collection and an anchored department is asking for two different placements at once; the Tree view flags that combination with a warning.

Create a featured collection (for example, "Fall Favorites")

Go to Inventory → Departments and click the Jump to: Collections button at the top of the page.
Click + New Collection. The Collection Info window opens.
Fill in Collection — the internal name you'll see in the POS, for example Fall Favorites.
Leave Parent Collection, Anchored Department, and Anchored Sub. Department set to None. That is what makes this a featured, top-level collection rather than a category buried inside a department.
Optionally fill in Web Name — the name shoppers see online, if you want it to differ from the internal name (see "What shoppers see: Collection name vs Web Name" below).
Optionally fill in Description — a short line of text shown under the heading on the collection's own page. (Ext. Description is a rich-text block that shows under the collection's picture tile when the collection sits under a parent collection; it does nothing for a top-level featured collection.)
Enter a Sort number to control where the tile lands in the featured row — see "Put your featured collection first" below. Start at 1, not 0.
Set Online to Yes.
Click Create.

The Web Title and Meta Description fields are for search engines, and Web Freight is for shipping setup — none of them are needed to feature a collection.

A brand-new collection has no items yet, and on most stores a collection with nothing in stock below it is hidden from the shop automatically, so it won't appear online until you add items. Fill it next.

Add items to a collection without changing their department

Adding an item to a collection is a change on the item, made from the item page. It leaves the item's Department and Sub Department untouched.

Open the item from Inventory → Search.
Scroll to the 🏷️ Classification section.
Click the Collections dropdown. It reads None when the item is in no collections, names the collections it belongs to when there are a few, and switches to a count ("4 selected") once there are more than three.
Type in the filter box at the top of the dropdown to narrow the list, then check every collection this item should belong to. Each entry shows the collection name followed by its ID number in parentheses.
Click Save (or Save & Back).

Notes:

An item can be in as many collections as you like. Checking "Fall Favorites" does not remove it from "Deer Resistant" — the checkboxes are independent.
The item's department is unaffected. Its Department and Sub Department dropdowns, its description prefixes, its tag type, and every department-based report keep working exactly as before.
Collection changes are recorded on the item's History tab, so you can see who added or removed a membership and when.
Editing items requires the Edit Inventory employee permission.
Some stores can also set Collections while creating a brand-new item from the New Item window. That is enabled per-client by VMX — contact help@vmxllc.com if you want it turned on.

Add many items to a collection at once

You do not have to open items one at a time to build a collection of a few hundred items. Export the items, edit one column, and import the file back — the Collections column on Inventory → Import/Export holds each item's collection ID numbers, separated by commas.

The ID numbers come from the ID column of the Collections table on Inventory → Departments, so create the collection first and note its ID.

Full step-by-step instructions, including the preview step and the warning about the column replacing (not adding to) an item's collections: Adding Many Items to a Collection at Once.

If your store has VMXpert, you can skip the spreadsheet and just ask — "put every Agave and Aloe in the Cactus and Succulents collection." VMXpert finds the items and shows you the whole job on one review card before anything is saved, and it only ever touches the collection you name. See Ask VMXpert to put items in a collection.

Put your featured collection first: the Sort field

Sort on a collection (set in the Collection Info window on Inventory → Departments) controls its position on your online store. Two things use it:

The featured row on the home page — featured collections are laid out left to right in Sort order. A collection with no Sort number sorts after all the numbered ones.
The store's category menu — departments and featured collections are mixed into one list ordered by their sort numbers. To place "Fall Favorites" above your departments in the menu, give it a Sort number lower than any department's Sort number.

Use 1 or higher. A Sort of 0 is treated as "no sort" by the category menu but as first place by the home page, so the collection lands in two different positions.

To renumber several collections at once, drag the rows of the Collections table into the order you want and click Save Sort. Save Sort renumbers every row in the table from 1 downward, in the order the rows are currently displayed — so use it only when you have deliberately arranged the whole list. To move a single collection, edit it and type a new Sort number instead.

Sort numbers are only ever compared among collections at the same level: children are ordered against their siblings, not against the whole store.

Give the collection a picture tile

A featured collection is displayed as a picture tile, so it needs an image.

Click More at the top of the page and choose Attachments, then click + Attachment (or drag the image file onto the page).
On the attachment page, set Type to Collection Image.
In the entity row below, choose Collection # and start typing the collection's name to pick it.
Check Show on web. Images without Show on web checked never leave the POS.
Optionally set Sort — if a collection has more than one image, the lowest Sort number is the one used for the tile.
Click Save.

If you do not attach an image, most stores fall back to the picture of the first item in the collection that has one. Attaching a proper image is worth it for a feature row that shoppers see first.

Note that a collection with an attachment cannot be deleted until the attachment is removed — you'll see "This collection has an attachment." Rotating the collection off the store (below) avoids the issue entirely.

Show a collection under a department instead of on the home page

If a collection is really a sub-category — "Fruit Trees" belonging under Trees & Shrubs, say — anchor it rather than featuring it:

Go to Inventory → Departments, Jump to: Collections, and click the pencil (edit) icon on the collection.
Set Anchored Department to the department it belongs under.
Leave Parent Collection as None.
Click Update.

The collection now appears as a picture tile on that department's page and as an entry in the category menu under that department, after its sub departments. It drops out of the home page featured row.

Anchored Sub. Department works the same way one level down: the collection becomes a picture tile on that sub department's page. It gets no category-menu entry of its own, so shoppers find it by opening the sub department. Set one anchor or the other, not both.

Anchoring is placement only. The collection still contains exactly the items you assigned to it — anchoring it to a department does not add that department's items, and the collection can still contain items from any department.

Group several collections under one heading

Collections nest. Set a collection's Parent Collection (in the Collection Info window on Inventory → Departments) and it becomes a child: a picture tile on the parent's page, and — when the parent is a featured, top-level collection — an indented entry under the parent in the category menu.

That gives you a two-level feature — a top-level "Seasonal" collection whose children are "Spring Picks," "Summer Picks," and "Fall Favorites," for example. Only the parent needs to be top-level (no parent, no anchor); the children get their placement from it.

Two things to know:

On most stores items do not roll up. A shopper on the parent's page sees only the items assigned to the parent itself, plus tiles linking to the children. If you want items to appear on the parent page, assign them to the parent as well.
If you switch the parent's Online setting to No, its children are still online but there is no longer a path to them through the store's menu.

Some stores have an option where a child collection is displayed inline on its parent's page — a heading followed by that child's items, instead of a tile shoppers have to click. That layout is enabled per-client by VMX; contact help@vmxllc.com if you'd like it considered for your store. The Tree view marks collections set up that way with a ★.

Control the order items appear inside a collection

Items on a collection page are ordered by each item's own sort value — the Web Sort Order field on the item's Website tab, shown as the Sort column in Inventory Search — then alphabetically. Items with no sort value come after the numbered ones, and items with a negative sort value come last of all — see Pin an item to the end of a listing.

To arrange them:

Go to Inventory → Departments, Jump to: Collections, and click the Sort link on the collection's row. Inventory Search opens filtered to that collection. (You can also get there from Inventory → Search by picking the collection in the Collection filter.)
Turn on the Sort column from the Columns dropdown if you want to see the current numbers.
Drag rows into the order you want using the move handle at the left of each row.
Click the Set Sort icon at the top right of the results and confirm "Set sort order for the below items?".

Each item's Web Sort Order is then set from its position in the list.

An item has one sort value, shared by every online listing it appears on — its department page, its sub department page, and every collection it belongs to. Ordering items inside one collection changes their order everywhere else online too. If that matters, sort the collection that most needs a deliberate order and let the others fall where they may.

Pin an item to the end of a listing

Give the item a negative Web Sort Order, on its Website tab: -1 sorts last, -2 second-to-last, and so on.

Use this for an item that belongs at the bottom of the list rather than at a particular place near the top — a delivery charge, a setup fee, a service add-on. Because an item has only one sort value, a single -1 puts it last on every online listing it appears on, including collections you build later, and you do not have to number any of the items above it.

The full order on a listing is:

Items with a positive sort number (1, 2, 3…), in that order.
Items with no sort number, alphabetically.
Items with a negative sort number, with -1 at the very bottom.

Dragging rows and clicking Set Sort leaves a pinned item alone: it keeps its negative number and stays at the end, and the items you did reorder are still numbered without gaps.

Rotate a seasonal collection out at the end of the season

Do not delete the collection — you would lose the item list you built and have to rebuild it next year. Switch it off instead:

Go to Inventory → Departments and click Jump to: Collections.
Click the pencil (edit) icon on the collection.
Set Online to No.
Click Update.

The collection disappears from the home page featured row, from the category menu, and from any department page it was anchored to. Its item memberships stay exactly as they were. Next season, set Online back to Yes and it returns with its items — adjust the item list first if it needs freshening.

Two related behaviors worth knowing when you plan a rotation:

On most stores a collection with nothing in stock below it hides itself from the shop automatically, so a "Spring Bulbs" collection quietly drops off when the last item sells out and reappears when stock arrives. (A small number of stores are set up to keep empty collections visible; VMX configures that per store.)
If you switch a parent collection off but leave its children on, the children stay online with no way to reach them through the store's menu.

For a rotating feature — a new set of picks every week or two — the least work is to keep one collection ("This Week's Picks") online permanently and change its membership: remove last week's items from the Collections field on each item page and add this week's, or use the Import/Export method above for a larger swap.

If all you want is to highlight stock that recently landed, note that most VMX stores already do that automatically: items received in the last two weeks carry a New arrival badge, and the department or sub department holding them is badged New arrivals!. A New Arrivals collection is for picks you want to choose by hand.

What shoppers see: Collection name vs Web Name

A collection has two names, both in the Collection Info window on Inventory → Departments:

Collection — the internal name, shown in the POS: in the Collections table, in the Collections field on item pages, and in the Inventory Search Collection filter.
Web Name — the name shoppers see on your online store, used for the tile caption, the collection's page heading, and the category menu entry.

If Web Name is blank, shoppers see the internal Collection name. That is why an internal naming habit like a trailing code or abbreviation shows up online unless you fill in a Web Name.

Both names appear side by side in the Tree view — use the Customer names / + internal toggle to show them together.

Troubleshooting: the collection doesn't appear on the online store

Work down this list on Inventory → Departments, in the Collections section:

Is Online set to Yes? The Online column shows ✅ when it is. A collection with Online set to No is never shown to shoppers.
Does it have items in it that are actually sellable online? On most stores an empty collection is hidden automatically — and a collection counts as empty if all of its items are out of stock, not marked Allow Selling?, or not marked Show item on web?. Open the collection's Sort link to see its items and check those settings on a few of them. See Website Sync.
Are Parent Collection and both anchor fields empty? A collection with a Parent Collection or an Anchored Department is placed inside that thing, not in the home page featured row. If you expected it on the home page, clear those fields.
Is its parent switched off? If the collection is a child and the parent has Online set to No, there is no route to the child through the store's menu.
Give it a few minutes. Collection changes reach the online store on the next sync, and the store caches its featured-collection list briefly. A new or changed collection typically appears within a few minutes.
Check the Tree view. Click Tree view above the Collections table. It states in plain language how each collection will render online and flags the common mistakes with a ⚠ marker.

If everything above checks out and the collection still isn't showing after 15–30 minutes, contact help@vmxllc.com with the collection name.