Manage Product Categories

Organizing your product catalog into a user-friendly category tree is one of the most important ongoing tasks to support the buyer experience. Assigning products to categories helps you to organize your shop and your buyers to interact with a clear product structure navigation.

When creating products, you can allow sellers to select a category at any level or only allow them to select leaf categories, which are those that do not have subcategories.

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You must add categories to your storefront navigation for them to appear. If you're using the reference storefront, you can update the navigation bar from the Dashboard.

Considerations

• A product must be assigned to a category before it can be published in the storefront.
• A product can only be assigned to one category.
• A category can have any number of subcategories.

Add a category

1. From the Dashboard, go to Products -> Categories.
2. Select Create category.
3. On the Create category page, complete the following fields:
   • Enter a category name.
   • Enter a category description.
   • To prevent products from being assigned to this category, disable the Allow Products to be assigned to this Category toggle. This is enabled by default.
4. Select Save.
   Once the category is saved, you can add a category photo, subcategories, and assign products (if enabled).

Add a category photo

1. From the Dashboard, go to Products -> Categories.
2. Open the category you want to add a photo to.
3. Scroll to the Background Image section, click on the + button to upload an image.
4. (Optional) To add alternative alt text for the image:
   1. Hover over the image and select the edit icon.
   2. Edit the alternative text in the Description field.
5. Select Save.

Add a subcategory

Subcategories break large groups down into smaller subsets that make it easier to manage stores and help buyers find products.

1. From the Dashboard, go to Products -> Categories.
2. Open the category you want to add subcategories to.
3. Open the Subcategories tab.
4. Select Create subcategory.
5. Follow the same process to create a category.

Assign products to a category

1. Go to Products -> Products.
2. In the Products list, open the product you want to assign to the category.
3. Navigate to the Category field and select a category in the dropdown menu.
4. Select Save.

Edit categories

Once you have your categories set up, you can edit them at any time by opening a category, making your changes, and saving.

Delete categories

1. Go to Product -> Categories.
2. Select one or more categories.
3. Select Delete and confirm you want to delete the selected categories.

Manage category metadata

You can add, edit, or remove private and public metadata for each category in the category setup page. The following steps show how you can do this:

1. Go to Product -> Categories.
2. Select the category you want to make changes to.
3. Go to the Advanced section and select the + button to add both metadata and private metadata fields.
4. Input your metadata as a custom key : value pair.
5. Save your changes when you are done.

To learn more about object metadata, see the Developer's Guide.