An ECommerce-like Menu For A Non-ECommerce CMS Collection?

Design help General
1

Hey everyone,

Please excuse any ignorance here - I’m new to Webflow, and no web designer, so sometimes I don’t even know how articulate what it is I want to! But, simply put, I’m trying to figure out if it’s possible to build [what I describe below] with Webflow (and with that, trying to figure out whether I should pull the trigger on paying for Webflow/building this project with it).

I have a collection of digital products/links/items I’d like to organize much like you would physical products in a store, in the following format:

  • A grid of products || If I’m not mistaken, this would be a CMS Collection displayed on a page as a Collection List
  • A sidebar with product Categories that, upon being clicked, will filter the CMS items being displayed on the page || From what I can tell, it seems like I would do this by having a CMS Collection of product Categories/Attributes, and display them somehow using tabs(?)
  • Nested categories that show only when the parent category/attribute is selected, and similarly filter the products/CMS list. For example, if this were clothing, and someone selected “Footwear”, that category would extend to reveal “Boots”, “Sneakers”, “Flip-Flops”, etc.

So, a general Yes or No question: is it possible to build this using CMS collections and tabs, or something else for that matter?

A slightly more detailed question: I notice that you can’t have a hierarchy within a CMS collection, so would child categories related to a parent (like “Boots”, “Flip-Flops” nested under “Shoes”, to use the above example) have to be in a separate CMS Collection?

An even more detailed question, at the risk of getting ahead of myself: if it is possible to do all of the above, would it be possible to have users save items from the CMS list somehow, into a kind of bookmark section, in place of a cart (to continue the ECommerce-but-not-ECommerce analogy)?

Thanks in advance for any help/insight!

p.s. (I’d add a read-only link here, but my site is hardly even a skeleton at this point…nothing to see yet!)
p.p.s. I wasn’t sure whether to post this topic under Design, or CMS & ECommerce help. If it would be better placed there, please let me know

2

Hey @Alex_H,

First off, welcome and congratulations on the new endeavor. I know how hard it is starting out.

  1. From your description it looks like most of it can be done, except the user saving items from your CMS, not sure about that. It probably would a require server side database and scripting like PHP, etc.

Multiple layers using CMS is a challenge when trying to figure out how to navigate the steps. I recently ran into a puzzle with a client’s knowledge base. If you need help simply asking questions and getting a handle on the capabilities before diving in, I’d be happy to help.

I’ve yet to build an Ecommerce site, but the premise is still same as a KB (multi-layers).

Hope this adds encouragement. Message my profile if want to talk. There are others here who can offer assistance, hopefully they will chime in.

3

Hi @garymichael1313,

Thanks for the insight. Saving items from the CMS is more of an ideal than an immediate need, so I’m mainly wondering about Categories (Parents) + Sub-Categories (Children). I expected that saving items would probably take some custom coding.

I’ll send a message along soon!