Categories: how customers find things

You’ll need: Products, Product catalogue reports — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

A catalogue nobody can navigate is a search box, and a search box only helps a customer who already knows what your product is called.

The three levels

Products sit in a parent category, a product category and a product subcategory. Three levels is enough to be useful and few enough to stay consistent, which matters more than depth.

These drive the filters and browsing on your public shop. Change a product’s category and the shop reflects it immediately, because it is the same record.

Category-specific fields appear as you need them

You may notice that choosing certain categories reveals extra fields — sizes for clothing, storage capacity and model for devices, age groups for baby goods.

This is deliberate. A shoe genuinely needs a size and a laptop genuinely needs a storage capacity, and neither should clutter the form for a bag of rice. If the form changes shape when you pick a category, nothing is broken.

Getting the taxonomy right

The mistake is not choosing too few categories. It is choosing them one product at a time, so that six months later you have “Drinks”, “Beverages” and “Soft drinks” holding a third of the same thing each, and no filter that shows a customer everything you sell to drink.

   BAD                        BETTER
   Drinks                     Drinks
   Beverages                    Soft drinks
   Soft drinks                  Water
   Water bottles                Juice
   Juices

Decide the shape of the taxonomy first, with whoever knows the range, and then place products into it. Ten minutes with a pen beats a year of near-duplicates.

Inventory categories are a different thing

A product also has an inventory category, and it is not the same as the shop taxonomy. The shop categories are how customers browse; the inventory category is how you organise what you hold. They often align and they do not have to — customers care about “Cold drinks”, your warehouse cares about “Chilled”.

The catalogue report

Product catalogue reports let you list your range by category, and — the genuinely useful part — filter to products missing a price or missing a translation. That is how you find the twelve products that never got a French name before a customer does.

Run it before a campaign rather than after.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create products across two categories, then browse the public shop and filter. Then run a catalogue report filtered to missing prices, and notice how much faster that is than scrolling a list looking for gaps.