Trouble Organizing Large Collections

[Connie]

I'm having trouble organizing my larger collections. When I click on the blue arrows to move something to the bottom, it doesn't actually move to the very bottom of the collection, but somewhere in the middle, that I assume is the bottom of the page or something, although the page keeps expanding as you scroll down. And of course, dragging and dropping on a large collection is a hit or miss exercise when you try to scroll down to put something at the bottom. So how do you all organize your large collections? When I make new products with the same design, I try to put them near similar products (like all the table decor together, for a wedding suite.) Btu that is difficult when things don't move where I want them to!

[Cat · Accepted solution]

Well, my method is to curse a lot! 🤐 Seriously, you can sorta trick the page down thing because it seems to consider the "bottom" to be the furthest you have scrolled down in the collection. So if you want it to move all the way to the bottom, scroll all the way down first. Other than that, I don't have a lot of great tips to offer other than to use great caution when moving something up because if you're not careful that sucker will fly all the way to the top. 

I think Barbara from Colorwash once suggested zooming your browser WAY out so that the icons are tiny, and then moving them because you have more on your screen that way. I never seem to think of that though - probably because I'm having too much fun yelling at the computer screen! 🤣

[Natalia]

I’m working on iPad in Safari browser and basically that is the only solution: you have to scroll down as far as you want to place the item, then go back to the top and click that blue arrow to move the item down. We have it even worse on mobiles, you cannot drag the item up or down, only sideways.

I have been asking for a while to have the ability to add the items to the END of a collection, that would be so helpful. My best items are already placed at the top of the collection and most of the time I would like to keep them there. So every time I add to the collection, I have to play this annoying moving game.

[Cat]

Oy! Well, at least collections don't go blank anymore every time we make a change. I used to avoid re-arranging them because it would make them disappear for a few days, so I'd wait until the thing was a colossal mess and then do it all at once. Baby steps. 🙂

[Connie]

I didn't even think of scrolling all the way down first- thank you very much! I do zoom out my browser, but I can't go too far because I still need to be able to see what I'm doing. I like Natalia's suggestion to Zazzle to automatically put new additions at the end. It would be even better if we could have sort of "subcategories" in our collections in the backend, that wouldn't be visible to the customers, but would help with arranging large collections. But for now, I guess we're stuck with what we've got.

[Scott]

I agree this is a bit weird. I'll see if we can get this updated.

I'm also moving this over to the General Discussion board as it's unrelated to our community site.

[WittyBetty]

I might be wrong, but I recall it's been this way since the moment the 'drag and drop' method was changed to 'drag, unintentionally click and get to the product page instead, and lose all the changes you made" method; in other words, when the product thumbnails in the Organizing mode became clickable (they were not before). It's been for I don't know how long. I just know that I myself made a post about this in the old forum and have seen at least two or three posts about this issue (in the old forum also, so it's been at least months). My workaround is, I just focus on the first 6 or 7 products in the first rows to be in the right order and don't care much about the following rows. My take is, those 6 or 7 products that are shown in the "Other products from this collection" should be telling enough to make a customer click the collection link, and then I rely solely on the assumption that if someone clicked it, they are likely to scroll through the entire collection. Maybe not the best approach but it has saved me a lot of time and cussing 🙂

[Cat]

Ha! You know, recently I've discovered that if I accidentally click on an item and follow the link, all is not lost. If you use the back arrow from there it will take you back to the collection and it will look like all of your changes have been lost. BUT if you refresh the screen the changes you made are actually there. Not sure if that works in all situations, but it's been working for me recently.

[WittyBetty]

I think, "magic" is the most appropriate word there. I haven't tried refreshing a page, thanks for another great tip 🙂