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.
Creating Complex Category Filters
Once you have an understanding that a category is simply a group of products, you can create amazing subcategory structures and complex category filter systems using this system. It’s a bit hidden, but this feature unlocks some amazing features if you wanted to use a sidebar menu of categories that can filter products for users.
The process is pretty simple, create a category (top level) that will contain all your sub-categories and sub-sub categories filters.
Top level category: This will not do anything other than designate all the other categories under it as a part of the system. You will designate this single top-level category later in our settings which identifies it as the start of your complex category system. It will make sense as you read on.
Second Level Categories Headings: These will be the Menu Headings on your sidebar. For example, if you wanted to have headings for Men, Women, Children clothing on the sidebar, these would be second level categories. Simply select your Top Level category as the parent.
Third Level Categories Filters: These are the selectable checkbox category filters that exist under each second level heading. So for example, maybe under Women’s heading you wish to have Shirts, Coats, Suits. You simply make each of these third level categories a parent of that Women second level category.
Let’s take a closer look at these complex categories and how to setup.
Top Level Category
This is simply a new category and has NO parent level category. Typically you can call this ‘sidebar filter system’ or ‘sidebar filter menu’ as the name is used later just to select it.
Second Level Categories Headings
These second level headings will represent your sidebar menus. In this example, we create Mens and Womens headings and make them a part of the parent ‘Sidebar menu’. These secondary level categories can also contain ALL products that fall under that category… for example, Mens and Womens categories can contain all products that fall under them.
These headings will represent the main category headings here for Mens and Womens
Third Level Category Filters
Last, we create our third level category filters which will be represented by checkboxes under each heading. These third level categories should have the products that are under them applied. This is the ‘filter‘ system that these categories represent. In this example, under Women’s we have ‘Shirts, Suites, and Coats’ that represent each third level category filter. Users can enable/disable multiple categories this way for viewing and essentially filter all the items under that heading.
In this example, we can see that the user is allowed to multi-select multiple filters for viewing, and EasyCart will combined the complex categories into one search result.
Engaging Complex Category Fitlers
Last, we need to simply tell EasyCart which category will represent our entire complex category filter tree structure. This is a simple setting in our WP EasyCart -> Settings -> Products panel. Here we must turn ON the store sidebar. Then we can engage the Complex Category Filters system. Choose the correct Top Level Category we created previously that represents our entire tree structure and your set to go.
