Product categories

Categories are groups of products that you wish to show on the same page in your store (for example, Women's Fashion, Men's Clothing, Bestsellers). They help customers to faster navigate through the store and find the products they need. The same product can belong to multiple categories at the same time. Read more about how to manage the categories in your store.

Creating categories and subcategories
Assigning products to categories
Moving products from one category to another
Sorting products in categories
Changing categories order
Disabling and deleting categories
Hiding category images
Expanding categories

The products from one category are listed on a separate page in the storefront. This page can have a description and a featured image. When adding an image, make sure that it represents well the content of the category. Use the description to tell your customers what they will find in this category and what are the best things about the products there. Try not to make the description too long.

In Sauecommerce you can create a complex category structure with several levels. Categories of the first level are referred to as root categories. These are the categories your customers see in main navigation. You can also create categories of the second, third, etc. level within your root category. They are referred to as subcategories or child categories. The number of categories (and subcategories) you can have depends on the store plan that you are subscribed to.

Customers can navigate your categories and subcategories with the help of breadcrumbs – special links that show the path to the page they are currently viewing.

To create a new category of the first level:

To create a new subcategory:

In Sauecommerce a product must belong to at least one category. So, when you add products without assigning them to any of your own categories, they are automatically assigned to the Store Front page category and appear as featured products on your storefront.

To show products in your own categories, you should assign them to these categories. You can add products to multiple categories at once. For example, an item that belongs to the Shoes category can be on sale and belong to the Sale items category as well.

To assign multiple products to a category:

To assign a product to a category:

You can see how many products are assigned to a category in the category tree in  your Sauecommerce admin in  Catalog → Categories:

If one product is assigned to two or more categories, one of the categories will be marked as Default. The default category will be shown in the breadcrumbs on your product's page. For instance, if you assigned a coffee mug to the "Coffee" and "Mugs" categories and selected the "Mugs" category as default, breadcrumbs for the item on the products page will look like this: Home / Store / Mugs.

To change the default category:

1. From your Sauecommerce admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. Open the product you want to change the default category to.
3. Scroll down to the Categories section.
4. Choose the category you want to make default and click the three dots:
5. Click Make default and click Save:

You may need to rearrange products in your store and move them to another category. You can do this by exporting the products and importing them to a new category or by editing categories manually.

Exporting products and re-importing them to a new category

To rearrange many products, you can import them with new parameters. You need to export the products you want to change, edit them in a spreadsheet and then re-upload them to your store using the import feature. Please refer to the articles about exporting and importing your products.

Editing categories manually

You can manually rearrange categories for several products on the Catalog → Products or on the Catalog → Categories pages in your Sauecommerce  admin. The first option allows you to assign and remove categories in bulk.

To rearrange products on the Products page:

1. From your Sauecommerce admin, go to Catalog → Products.
2. Tick all the products you want to update (you can click Filter in the left upper corner to use filters and make the search faster).
   
   You need to create at least one category in your store (on top of the default Store front page category) before it becomes possible to assign or remove categories.
3. Click Mass Update → Manage Categories → Assign or Remove Categories.
4. Tick or untick the categories in the list:
5. Click Apply.

The changes will be saved automatically. The categories will be assigned to/removed from all the selected products.

If you need to add featured products to the Store front page or remove featured products from the Store front page in bulk, you can also do that on the Catalog → Products page.

You can choose in what order to show the products in the storefront to your customers. Products can be automatically sorted by date added, by price or by name. Or you can set a custom order of products within a category and arrange the products manually in the desired way.

If you wish to show some categories first, you can easily change the order of categories and subcategories.

To change the order of categories and subcategories:

If you wish to remove a category from your store, you can disable it or delete permanently.

Disabling a category

When you disable a category, it stops showing in your store. At the same time, you can see it in your Sauecommerce admin and enable it back anytime when needed.

To disable a category:

Deleting a category

If you wish to remove a category completely, you can delete it.

To delete a category:

When you add a category in your store, you can upload your own category image, keep a default gradient image (it appears if no category image is added), or you can hide the category images across your store.

If you hide the category images, only category names will be displayed. Example:

To hide category images in your store:

1. From your Sauecommerce admin, go to Design.
2. Scroll to Category name position.
3. Choose Hide category images.

The changes will be autosaved.

You can unfold root categories and display products from these categories right on the store front page. This category view is perfect for restaurants as it gives a menu-like look to the storefront. It also suits good the stores with small catalogs because customers can see all offered products at once.

Here is an example of how the expanded categories could look like:

To expand categories:

1. Go to Design.
2. Scroll to Storefront navigation & colors.
3. Select Expand categories.

The changes will be autosaved.

If you have more than 10 categories, 7 categories will shown as expanded in the storefront while others will be shown after clicking the Shop more categories link.