Set up your storefront: product pages, collections, menus and add-ons

Your storefront looks either bare or confusing, and you're not sure which knob moves what. That's expected: the catalog is a few small systems, not one screen. Here is what each one does.

Product pages

Every pool you publish gets its own product page, at `yourcompany.ontote.store/p/your-product`. Every card on your catalog links to one. The product page is where customers read the description and start a booking for that pool.

What customers see on a product page comes from the pool's Online store tab, and it is set per location:

Published at {location}: the checkbox that puts the pool on sale at that location.
Public name and Public description: the catalog copy for that location.
Sort order: a number that decides where the pool sits when you use manual sorting.

Photos on the product page are shared across locations. Use real photos of your actual totes. Real photos beat polish.

The variant picker

If you rent the same tote in Small, Medium and Large, you don't want three cards. You want one card with a picker. That's a product group.

1. Go to Settings › Product groups and click Add a product group.

2. Give it a Name (Moving tote) and an Option label (Size). The option label is what customers see as the picker name.

3. Open each pool's detail page, go to the Variation tab, and choose the group in the Product group field. The line under it says it plainly: "Attach this rental to a product group so the inventory list shows it with its siblings."

The storefront renders the group once, with one card and one picker. Grouping is display-only: each variant is still its own pool for booking, pricing and availability. If every variant of a group is unpublished or unpriced, the group never reaches the catalog at all.

Collection pages

A category is how you group things in your catalog. Each category that has items for sale also becomes a storefront collection page, at `yourcompany.ontote.store/c/your-category`.

1. Go to Settings › Categories and click Add a category.

2. Fill in Name and Description. The description shows on the collection page.

3. Assign pools and items to the category from their detail pages.

Renaming a category keeps its `/c/` address, so links to it don't rot. Categories are shared by rentable pools and sellable items, and the up/down arrows set the manual order.

Menus

Your website menus live under Settings › Website builder › Website menus. Link a menu item to a collection page and customers get a direct path to it.

One rule that trips people up: publishing rejects menu links to empty collections. That's on purpose. A menu link to a collection page with nothing for sale is a dead end for a customer. Add a priced, published item to the category first, then link it.

Sorting

Settings › Preferences › Sorting sets the default order for the whole store:

Default product sorting: Relevance (the order you arranged in your catalog), Name (A–Z), Name (Z–A), Price (low to high), Price (high to low).
Default collection sorting: Name or Manual.

Relevance uses your catalog order, so arrange pools deliberately there. If you want one item pinned at the top, give it a low Sort order number on its Online store tab instead of re-sorting everything.

Selling add-ons in the cart

Goods and services, moving boxes to sell or a stair-carry fee, can be bought as cart add-ons alongside a rental.

1. Open the item's detail page and go to the Online store tab. It says: "Customers can add this to a rental in the cart. It also needs a price at each location where it's sold."

2. Tick Sell online.

Two settings matter here:

Unlimited stock. Tick it for things you never run out of: "Stock isn't counted: no out-of-stock limit online, no decrement at delivery, and never on restock lists." Leave it off and the store stops selling the item when stock runs out.
Item kind. An item is a Good or a Service, set at creation, and it can't be changed later. Pick it right the first time.

To surface add-ons as suggestions, Settings › Cross-sell ("Show recommended products in your online store") controls the recommendations customers see in the cart.

Returning customers skip the typing

When a customer signs in on your store, checkout fills in their saved details: name, email, phone, and up to 5 saved delivery addresses. Guests type everything. Nothing to configure. That's it.

When something looks wrong

A pool you published still isn't on the store. It has no price at that location, or Published at {location} isn't ticked. Open the pool's detail page, Online store tab, and check both.
Your menu link to a collection won't publish. The collection is empty. Add a priced, published item to the category first.
An add-on never appears in the cart. It needs a price at the shopper's location. Set one and it shows up.