Groups & order

Groups aren’t cosmetic. They are how you make a long list of services scannable in two seconds — and the same groups become the filters a client sees when booking. This article walks the whole mechanism: creating a group, renaming and colouring it, what dragging does, where dragging does not work, and exactly what the client ends up seeing.

The path is Catalog → Offerings, then flip the view toggle at the top right to By groups.

1. Groups only exist in the “By groups” view

The offerings page has two views, and they can do different things:

	List	By groups
How services are laid out	flat list, up to three columns	sections per group + an Other section
Group button at the top right	hidden	shown
Drag to reorder	no	yes — both services and groups
Add button inside each section	no	yes
All / 1-to-1 / Group filter	yes	no
Stats on the cards	yes	no

The page opens in By groups. If you arrived from the attention band with the Only problem services filter, the view is pinned to List — switching to By groups clears the filter automatically.

If dragging doesn’t work, you’re almost certainly in “List”. That’s the number-one cause of “why can’t I reorder my services”.

2. Creating a group

1. Open Catalog → Offerings.
2. Switch to By groups.
3. At the top right, press Group (with the plus).

The group is created immediately, with no dialog. It is named New group and gets an automatic colour — the first free one from the built-in palette, so you never end up with two identical dots.

4. Click the name New group and change it.
5. Press Enter to save. Esc discards the edit; clicking away also saves.

An empty group shows the hint “Drop a service here, or hit Add.”

3. Filling a group

Three ways, all of them valid:

• Drag. Grab a service card and drop it into another section. The other cards shift to preview where it will land.
• The “Add” button in the section header. It opens the new-service editor with this group pre-selected, so the new service doesn’t fall into “Other”.
• From the editor. A service remembers its group; move it and the change is visible everywhere.

Order inside the group is changed by dragging too. It saves itself — there is no Save button. If something goes wrong you get Couldn’t save the new order.

4. Renaming, colour and deletion

Each group header carries:

Element	What it does
The grip handle on the left	drags the whole group up or down
The colour dot	opens an 11-colour palette; the choice saves immediately
The name	click to edit in place
The counter	how many services are in the group
Add	a new service straight into this group
The three-dot menu	Rename and Delete group

Deleting asks: Delete group «name»? — “Services inside this group will move to ‘Other’. They stay bookable.” The buttons are Delete group and Cancel.

Deleting a group does not delete services. They simply drop into Other and keep taking bookings. It is the safe operation, unlike deleting a service.

If something fails you’ll see one of: Couldn’t create group, Couldn’t rename group, Couldn’t change colour, Couldn’t delete group, Couldn’t save the new group order. They all mean the same thing — the request didn’t land; check your connection and try again.

5. The “Other” section

A service with no group lands in the Other section at the bottom. It is a real, labelled section, not “outside the list”.

• If you have at least one real group, Other only appears when it has something in it.
• If you have no groups at all, every service sits in Other — that’s the normal starting state of a new board.
• Other has no drag handle, no colour, and can’t be renamed or deleted. It isn’t a database row — it’s “everything else”.

You can drag services into and out of “Other” just like any other section.

6. What the client sees

Here is the important difference from what most people expect: groups do not become section headings on the public page. They become filter chips above the service list.

The client sees a row of chips:

1. All — selected by default, shows every service.
2. One chip per non-empty group, in your order.
3. Other — only when there is at least one real group and at least one ungrouped service.

Tapping a chip narrows the list to that group.

Three consequences worth knowing:

• An empty group never reaches the client. A chip that shows nothing is noise, so we hide it.
• The names are for the client, not for you. “Hair”, “Nails”, “Make-up” work. “Cat. 2 — extras” does not.
• The order is your order. Groups appear in the order you dragged them into; services inside appear in the order they sit in the section.

Rule of thumb. With fewer than 6 services, don’t create groups — a clean list reads faster. Groups start paying off from about 8–10 services upward.

7. Order inside a group

The order in the section is the order the client sees. Put your most-wanted or most-profitable service at the top — it catches the eye first and sets the impression of your prices.

Order lives on the board, not per person: what you arrange, every colleague and every client sees.

8. Troubleshooting

I can’t drag services. You’re in the List view. Switch to By groups at the top right.

I drag, then the order snaps back. The save failed — you should have seen Couldn’t save the new order. Try again; if it repeats, reload the page (the order is stored on the server, not in your browser).

I created a group but the client doesn’t see it. The group is empty. Put at least one bookable service in it.

I deleted a group by mistake. Its services are in Other, untouched. Create the group again and drag them back.

A service vanished from its group. Check you didn’t delete it (deleting a service means archiving it) — see Services: what clients book. If the service still exists but sits in Other, someone moved it.

There’s no “Group” button. You’re in the List view; it only appears in By groups.

What’s next

• Services: what clients book — the whole list page.
• Create a service — the editor, section by section.
• The booking-page editor — how all of this looks to the client.
• Featured services — when one service must stand out regardless of its group.