What is the Difference Between a Department and a Collection?

Departments

Departments serve as broad categories to help organize your Products internally, mainly for accounting purposes and to be displayed in Sales Reports.

Departments can also be utilized in the Admin panel for tasks like setting up Coupons, Promotions, and Dynamic Collections.

Examples:

Wine
Merchandise
Food

It's important to note that each Product can only be assigned to one Department, and they won't be visible on the front end to Customers.

Learn about setting up Departments here.

Collections

Collections are Product groupings used for display purposes on your website and/or in the POS. They can also be used to configure Promotions and Coupons.

Examples:

Create a Manual Collection of your Gift Packs available for Mother's Day so that your online Customers can easily see them.
Create a Dynamic Collection of your Reds so that it's easily accessible for your POS staff.

A Product can belong to multiple Collections at once - and you can create as many Collections as you'd like.

Learn about setting up Collections here.