Your own categories
Products › Categories. A category is a shelf in your own catalogue and nothing else depends on its name: it can be renamed, moved and deleted without touching a listing.
- Under Add a category, give it a name and say what it sits inside. Leave that at Top level for a root category.
- Press Add category. It appears in the tree with a count of the products filed under it.
- 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.
The words your shops use
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.
- Pick a word.
- Choose the category it means under File under.
- 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.
Matching a category on a channel
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 shop - Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento - has a taxonomy you own. Your category can be created there with one press, and the products filed under it publish into it.
- A marketplace - eBay, Amazon - decides its own categories, so yours has to be matched to one of theirs.
To match one:
- Press Find in the cell for that category and connection.
- Search. Type a product title rather than the shelf name if nothing comes back: marketplaces index their categories by what is in them.
- Choose the leaf. It is stored against that connection, and Remove undoes it.
Until a category is matched on a connection, nothing filed under it can be published there, and the screen says so on the category itself.
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.
- Open a product and find Item specifics.
- Choose the connection. If the product is not yet matched to a category there, the screen says so and there are no questions to answer yet.
- Answer what is asked. Required ones are marked. 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.
- Save and check again stores them and re-runs the preflight, so you can see the blockers clearing as you go.
Why it is asked live
Marketplace taxonomies are read from the channel at the moment you search, not from a copy kept here. A stored copy goes stale silently: the category is renamed or retired at the channel, everything keeps working on this screen, and the bill arrives months later as a refused publish that names a category id nobody recognises.
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.