Managing product categories

In this article, you will learn more about how to:

• Create a new product category
• Edit an existing product category
• Delete product categories
• Assign categories to a product
  
  

To get started with managing your store's product categories, login to the Prodigy Cloud Platform and navigate to the Products -> Categories in the left sidebar menu.

Create a new product category

To start the process of creating a new product category, click on the Create Category button at the top right side of the screen.

The first field to complete is the Category Name. It’s a required field for a Category creation. The Name that you give to the category is what will be visible on the frontend of your website when customers are navigating by category or viewing a product page.

The Slug is what will be used in URLs on the frontend of the site when customers are navigating to a category page. The slug can only contain letters, numbers, and hyphens. If you leave the Slug field blank, it will be generated by the system automatically.

The next optional field is the Parent Category.  Product categories are hierarchical, so you can create levels of nested categories like the following by assigning a parent category to the child categories:

The product category description can be useful if you want to customize your theme to show a description at the top of category pages or in the product categories widget.

If you plan to use the product category shortcode to display a list of categories, you might want to add an image to display for each category.

When you are done, you can then click the Create button to save your new product category.

Edit an existing product category

You will see the list of all of your store's product categories on the Categories page. To edit an existing product category, just click on the name of the category, and you will be navigated to the Edit Category page.

There are the exact same fields from the create new category form.  You can edit them and then click the Update button to save your changes.

Delete product categories

It’s possible to delete a product category from the Edit Category page by clicking on the Delete button.

If you delete a category which is used as a Parent category, the child categories will shift up one level in the hierarchy.

For example, if you have the following category hierarchy:

• Women
  • Clothing
    • Shirts
    • Pants
      
      

After deleting the Women category, the Clothing category will shift up one level and become a root category and the children of clothing will be unaffected. 

• Clothing
  • Shirts
  • Pants
    
    

When deleting a category, you will be asked to confirm that you want to delete the category.  In the case where the category has already been assigned to products, you will see the number of products that it will be removed from upon deletion.

Assign categories to a product

From the Create Product or Edit Product pages, you are able to assign a category to a particular product.

To assign categories to that product simply click on the  + Add Product Categories link.

You will see all existing product categories in the modal window that expands. When you assign product to a Child category, it will be automatically assigned to the Parents of that child.

That's all you need to know about managing product categories.  In the next article, we will go over Managing product attributes