We'll soon be launching a new "Product Listing" content type which will eventually replace the use of photo albums in the Marketplace. It will also replace the Market content type, although not too many of you use that one anyway. This new content type will combine all of the great features of photo albums, like unlimited photos and a photo-based display on your shop home page, but will also add other features that are more e-commerce centric. For example, there will be a field for Price, the ability to include videos with your photos, areas for delivery information, inventory management, and more.
I'll provide more details about the new product listings in a separate post, but one byproduct of them is that you will likely have many more product listings then your currently do today. Many of you currently post multi-product photo albums. That is, a photo album that contains many different products. For example, an album called "Fall Collection" may have 20 different dresses in it, each with its own price. With the new product listing content type, you'll really only be posting one product per listing. This is because the other data that you specify in the listing, like price and product options (e.g., color, size), will likely only apply to one specific product.
Because of this, we are also going to introduce a new concept called "Collections". A collection is a set of individual product listings. So, instead of having one photo album called "Fall Collection", you would have a collection of the same name and it would contain all of the individual product listings that comprise the fall collection. Note that a product listing can be in multiple collections. For example, those red shoes might be part of the Fall Collection and the Shoes collection. Collections will be based on tags.
Now, to the real point of this post. How should we treat collections on your shop's homepage? We will be adding a new "Shop" layout option for homepages, to go along with the current Boxes and Linear options. The Shop layout will basically make your entire homepage a display of product listings. There will be an optional "Featured Products" section at the top, and you'll be able to specify which products to include there. Below that will be the rest of your product listings, displayed 25 per page. Please forgive my mockup skills, but this is roughly what it would look like:
My initial thinking on how to integrate collections into this was to have a Collections section that would go either above or below the Featured Productions section. This section would display all of your collections in a format similar to that in the Featured section. Another option would be to integrate them into the Featured section, so you could select specific product listings to feature and/or collections. Any alternative suggestions?
