Categories and Brands
Categories organise the catalogue; brands describe who made the thing. They are separate on purpose.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Commercial:
- Carts — the cart itself and its options
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — then View Data on the cart table, and look for the row actions
Categories are a tree
Each category has a parent, so the catalogue nests as deeply as you need. A category also carries its own image and its own HTML above and below the listing, so a category page can be a piece of content rather than a bare grid.
Allow products only where they belong
A category can be marked as accepting products or not. Marking the branches as no and the leaves as yes prevents the mess where the same product appears at three levels of the tree and nobody knows which listing is canonical.
Design the tree for buyers
Not for your internal product hierarchy, and not for your supplier’s. The question is how a customer would look for the thing, which is often quite different from how you file it.
Three levels is usually plenty. Deeper trees hide products, and buyers give up before reaching the leaves.
Brands are richer than a label
A brand carries a name, tagline, description, logo, cover image, video, website and social links. That is enough to make a brand page worth visiting rather than a filter value.
Whether you use that depends on your business — a shop selling recognised brands benefits from it, a shop selling its own does not.
Brands can carry their own fields
Additional fields can be defined for brands, so you can hold whatever your business needs against them — a supplier reference, a margin band, a contact.
Preview before publishing
Both categories and brands have preview available directly from the row, so you can see the page as a customer would before it is live. Use it, particularly where you have written HTML above or below a listing.
Restructuring later is disruptive
Category URLs are what search engines have indexed and what customers have bookmarked. Moving the tree around after launch loses both, so it is worth more thought before launch than it feels like it deserves.
Worked example
A shop uses three levels, with only leaf categories accepting products and short introductory HTML on each second-level page. Brands carry logos and descriptions, and each has a page. Both were previewed before publication, which caught a category image that was the wrong shape on mobile.
Recommendations
- Structure for buyers, not for your internal filing.
- Only leaf categories accept products.
- Three levels is usually enough.
- Preview before publishing, especially with custom HTML.