What are collections?

Overview

What are collections?

Collections are custom inventory lists than can be published as pages on your website.

How are they different than my standard inventory pages?

Collections are hosted on the /cars/ slug and only include the vehicles you specify. Your standard inventory pages, on the other hand, are hosted on the /inventory page and by default include all of your inventory.

How can I use collections?

You can group your inventory into collections to make it easier for customers to find them by category. Here are a few examples of collections that you might create:

• inventory separated by brand
• inventory of a certain type, such as SUV, Sedans, or Trucks
• inventory on sale
• inventory of a certain trim level or color
• inventory with specials applied, such as transient APR specials or manager's specials.

Collection types

You can create two types of collections:

An automated collection uses custom filters to automatically include matching inventory. When a vehicle gets imported that matches the custom filters for a collection, it is automatically added to the collection.

Automated collections are usually preferred because, after you set up the filters, future vehicles are added automatically. For example, suppose that you have a lot of custom trucks and you use vAuto. If you tag all your custom trucks with a tag in vAuto, such as custom, then all your custom trucks can automatically be included in the matching collection.

One drawback to creating an automated collection is that you can't remove particular vehicles from it unless you change the collection's conditions or edit the vehicle's details so that they no longer match the conditions.

A manual collection includes only the vehicles that you choose individually (or in bulk via the inventory table). Because of this, the collection always contains the same vehicles unless you specifically add or remove vehicles. Additionally, if a vehicle is sold, it is automatically removed from the manual collection. For this reason, manual collections require constant maintenance to ensure that they always have vehicles inside them.

Manual collections take more work to maintain, but can be a good choice for small or specialized collections that you intend to curate personally. For example, if you plan to hold a one-time sale of just a few vehicles, then you can create a manual collection for them and set up a discount for just the vehicles in that collection.