Categories and mapping

Internal categories

Products › Categories. A category organises your internal catalogue. It can be renamed, moved or deleted without changing a channel listing.

1. Under Add a category, give it a name and say what it sits inside. Leave that at Top level for a root category.
2. Press Add category. It appears in the tree with a count of the products filed under it.
3. Rename, Move and Delete are on each row. Deleting says how many products will be left with no category, and a category with subcategories asks you to deal with those first.

Imported category terms

Every shop has its own name for a shelf, and an import brings those words with it. Words your channels use lists them with a count of the products carrying each one.

1. Pick a word.
2. Choose the category it means under File under.
3. Press File. The products carrying that word move to that category, and the decision is remembered for the next import.

Mappings below shows every decision made so far, and marks the ones an import guessed because the word matched a category name exactly. Forget removes a mapping; products already filed stay where they are.

The Types screen does the same job from the other end: it lists every type in the catalogue with a Give it a category beside it.

Mapping a channel category

On your channels, at the foot of the Categories screen, is a grid: your categories down the side, your connections across the top. There are two kinds of channel and they behave differently.

• A merchant-operated shop has a taxonomy you control. An internal category can be created there, and its products can be published into the corresponding shop category.
• A marketplace defines its own categories, so an internal category must be mapped to the relevant marketplace category. On Amazon the mapping uses a product type rather than a shelf: it decides which details Amazon validates the listing against.

To match one:

1. Press Find in the cell for that category and connection.
2. Search, or switch to Browse and walk the channel’s own tree from All categories down, filtering each level as you go. If a search for the shelf name finds nothing, try a product title; marketplaces often index categories by the products they contain.
3. Choose the leaf. It is stored against that connection, and Remove undoes it.

The same match is on every product page, under Filing: Category on eBay (or on whichever channel is chosen at the top of the page) shows the matched category with its whole path, and Find a category or Change opens the same search and browser. It is a match for your category, not for that product alone, so every product in the category goes to the same place.

Browsing reads each channel’s tree a level at a time and holds what it has read, so going back up and down again is instant. On Shopify there are two trees to browse: your collections, and Shopify’s standard product categories.

Products in a category cannot be published through a connection until that category is mapped. The category screen shows the current mapping status.

eBay Store categories

A seller with an eBay Store has a second column beside eBay category: Store category. The eBay category says what the item is and decides its item specifics; the Store category is the shelf it sits on in your own shop. Press Match, then search or browse your Store’s categories and choose one. Only a category with nothing under it can hold listings.

Every listing published or updated from that category is filed on the matched shelf. A product whose category has no Store category matched stays on the shelf it already has at eBay. On import, a listing is filed under your category when its Store category is already matched to one. Store categories are made and renamed at eBay; a new one is on offer here a few minutes later.

Item specifics

A marketplace describes a product with its own list of questions - Brand, Colour, Size, Style - and the list comes from the category the product is matched to. They are answered per connection, because the category is per connection.

1. Open a product and choose the channel at the top of the page. Item specifics, prices, the category and the listing all follow that choice.
2. Find Item specifics. If the product is not yet matched to a category there, the panel says so and there are no questions to answer yet.
3. Answer what is asked. Required ones are marked, and a long list shows the required and answered ones first, with Show more for the rest. Boxes suggest the marketplace’s own values as you type. Several arrive filled in from your product - the brand, the colour off an option - and those are marked as suggestions to check rather than as answers.
4. Add a field, at the end of the list, adds a question of your own.
5. Press Save changes at the top of the page. It saves the whole page, item specifics included, and Discard beside it takes back everything not yet saved.

Live channel requirements

Marketplace taxonomies are read from the channel at the moment you search, not from a local copy. This avoids stale mappings when a channel renames or retires a category and provides a clear validation message before publishing.

The same is true of what a category requires. Where a marketplace states its requirements only by refusing a listing, that refusal is read and remembered, so the second product in that category is asked for the right things before it is sent.