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Categories

To organise your products into groups of similar items you will need to create categories.

Categories are essential to making your products easy to find on your website. Any product that is not placed within a category will only be able to be seen through a direct search for it or by creating a link to it in one of your website's link lists.

• Category basics
• Category structure
• Category SEO


Category basics

Creating categories for your products helps your customers to navigate your website and find the product they are looking for. Additionally, through categories, your customers will easily be able to find related products and browse through your other products to increase the likelihood of impulse purchases.

Each category that you create should have:

  • A name/title
  • A description (which describes the types of products within the category)
  • An image

Category structure

Helpful tip!

Before you begin making categories it is advisable that you first fully plan out your category structure, especially if you will have a large number of products and categories.

Your category structure can consist of subcategories and parent categories:

  • A parent category is a category that contains other categories.
  • A subcategory is a category that is placed within a parent category.

When creating your category structure keep these things in mind:

  • A category can be both a parent category and a subcategory.
  • A subcategory can be placed into multiple parent categories.
  • A category cannot contain both products and other categories.
  • A product can be placed into multiple categories.

Your category structure can have multiple levels to it, as in this example:

This structure follows these levels down:

Website Home Page
sportswear
ladies fitness tops
crew tops
products

  1. First, at the top of the structure, is the website home page. This is likely to be the first thing a visitor to your website will see.
  2. From the home page you can access the parent category ‘sportswear’. ‘Sportswear’ is the first parent category in this structure and would therefore not have been placed in a category as well. There can be no products directly placed in this category.
  3. The ‘sportswear’ parent category contains the subcategory ‘ladies fitness tops’. This category is both a subcategory and also a parent category as it contains other categories as well as being placed in a category. There can be no products directly placed in this category either.
  4. Finally, following the structure down, is the ‘crew tops’ category. This category is only a subcategory as it does not contain any other categories. Therefore, products can be placed in this category.

Your category structure can be as simple or as complex as you decide. Just make sure you have thoroughly planned it out before you start creating categories and adding products to them.


Category SEO

Every category on your account will have its own page/URL on your website, e.g. www.yourdomain.com/crew-tops.

Each of your category pages can rank for particular keywords in search engines. Therefore, if you have a larger website you will more easily be able to rank for a broad range of keywords.