Best practices and advanced Category management

Categories are an important part of managing your digital commerce project. Here you can find the best practices for Category management you should apply when working with Composable Commerce.

• Use Categories with facets and filters: you must balance the usage of Categories with facets to let customers navigate and apply filters to find their desired Product. While Categories help customers find the right Product group, with facets customers can shorten the list based on attributes like color, brand, and size or other factors like price range. Facets are used to narrow down the search to Products with related characteristics. You can use facets and filters in your storefront to provide a better search experience to your customers.
• Stay consistent with Category names: when modeling your Products, you will find yourself adding the same list of child Categories in multiple Categories. For example, for a fashion retail store, you might create the Clothing, Shoes, and Accessories child Categories under the Men, Women, and Kids Categories. While doing this, be consistent with the names of child Categories.
• Refer to the documentation: you can access certain features only through the API, as they are not available in the Merchant Center. To make informed decisions, always refer to our documentation for details. For example, assets and search keywords can be used from the API only.
• Customize Categories: Categories are also a customizable resource that you can extend with your content, workflow, and metadata. In Composable Commerce, you can model your own Custom Fields on Categories. For a step-by-step example on how to use Custom Types, visit this tutorial. Note: Before you can use Custom Fields in the Merchant Center, they need to be created using the API.
• When to use Categories instead of Product Types: Categories are generally more flexible than Product Types and Product Attributes, as it’s easier to add and remove Products from them. If you aren’t sure whether to model something as a Category or a Product Type, in most cases it’s better to use a Category. Categories are also more useful when you require hierarchical data. For example, if you need to show a Category (such as Shirts) and its child Categories (such as Long sleeves, Short sleeves, and Crop tops). Attributes, instead, provide a flat data structure.
• Keep search performance in mind: if you add a Product to too many Categories, the Product file becomes too large to retrieve. Similarly, if you have too many Categories, search re-indexing can become difficult.
• Keep Categories simple: when creating product Categories, keep your customers in mind. The Category tree should match the customers’ browsing patterns. Category names must be simple and from day-to-day life. For example, “Pants” and “Women’s Pants” are simple Categories, while “Women’s wool work pants” is too complex.
• Keep Category trees simple: Categories are often used to model navigation in storefronts. Category trees which are nested many levels deep, while perhaps modeling the nuances of your Products, can result in a poor user experience in the storefront. In general, shallower Category trees are better. Keep Category levels to the minimum to limit the number of steps to find a Product.
• Cache Category trees: enhance your applications performance by caching a streamlined version of your Category tree data. This involves removing unused fields and optimizing the structure for faster retrieval.
• Iterate to improve: let’s accept the fact that you are not going to get it perfect in the first attempt. Be ready to iterate as you receive more feedback and analysis results. Also, when adding new Products to Categories you might need to rethink the overall categorization strategy.