Categories are the best way to group products together. You can add as many products as you like to a category and you can have as many categories as you like. You can display categories on your main wordpress menu, sidebars, or link to them anywhere from your website. They are very simple and yet very powerful way to keep your store organized and products in various groupings.
Video Guide – Creating Product CategoriesOrganize your products into segments and categories easily in EasyCart. Add categories to your menus, banners, imagery, and other areas of your eCommerce shopping cart. |
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How Categories are Used
The first step is to create a category and give it a name. Featured categories would appear above your store IF you have the ‘show featured categories’ setting turned on within the product settings area. Parent categories can be used to organize your categories into various subcategories, although another method of organizing the categories is usually done through the menu system, simply creating children under one another for display purposes. We also offer priority settings so you can setup which categories are more important than others. A category with priority 1 will show ahead of a category with priority 5, so use this feature to order your categories for use in various shortcode displays.
For example, creating a main group of products called ‘Clothing’, then another category for ‘Women’s Clothing’, then another category for ‘Women’s Tops’ and so on and so forth. Then you can display those on your menus, sidebars, etc. however you wish showing the hierarchical structure.
How to Add/Edit Categories
Categories are located in the WP EasyCart -> Products -> Categories screen. Click “Add New” or edit by clicking the pencil icon or clicking the category title.
- Is Category Active – Enable/Disable the category in your store.
- Is Featured Category – There are features in the WP EasyCart that highlight featured categories including shortcodes and store settings.
- Category Name – The title that will appear in your store.
- Priority – Whole number that will set the default sort order. You may also drag and drop the category list to organize your categories.
- Link Slug – Sets the URL slug and useful for SEO. Lowercase, numbers, and dashes are allowed values and must be unique.
- Parent Category – Organize your category display with parent and children categories.
- Banner Image – Displayed above the products on the category and in featured category display.
- Short Description – Used for SEO purposes.
- Post Excerpt – Used for SEO purposes.
- Post Featured Image – Often display in search results for your site (theme dependent) and in for SEO purposes.
How to Deactivate/Activate a Category
You may deactivate/activate a category by clicking the eye icon in the row for a category. You may also set this when editing the category itself.
How to Add Categories to your WordPress Menu System
WP EasyCart creates “store items” for everything in your store. These must be enabled and added to your menu system through WordPress. We have an entire help document about this topic, please learn how to add these categories to your menu system by Clicking Here.
How to Use Categories and Shortcodes
Learn how to add shortcode for these categories by Clicking Here.
How to Manage Products in a Category
From the list of categories you can access a full list of products by hovering your mouse over the category title and clicking the edit product list link OR clicking the box with an outbound arrow icon on the right, circled in red below.
Once you click into product management for a category, you should see “manage products for ‘Specials’ category”. From this panel, you can choose to add new products or to delete products that exist under this category. Use the bulk actions to quickly delete multiple products from the list or click “add new” to add new products.
Now that you are viewing a full list of products, you must use the checkboxes to select the products you want to add, then use the Bulk Actions to add them to the category in bulk
How to Add a Category to a Product
In addition to adding products to a category, you can add categories to a product. Navigate to WP EasyCart -> Products and edit the product. From there, scroll to the categories section and add categories to the product one at a time.
Setting Category Sort Order
To quickly set the category sort order, when you have 500 or less categories, you may drag and drop them when on the WP EasyCart -> Products -> Categories panel. When hovering over the row, click and drag the item to the correct spot. Once done BE SURE TO CLICK SAVE SORT!
You may also set the sort order by editing the category and setting the sort order value. Lower numbers will appear first.
