Enterprise Class Business Management Platform

Categories

Catalog - Categories

Categories define groups of products that are similar in some important way. A Category can contain both Products and sub-categories, and it can have its own descriptive material including images. There are two basic types of categories:
  • Categories for Catalogs -- These Categories are used in the Customer Catalogs or the Purchasing Catalogs to define groupings that are helpful for selling or buying items.
  • Categories for WebSite Control -- These are unique Categories that determine when and how the Category items are presented in the Online WebSite Store. These categories help to organize what how the WebSite Store presents Featured Products, Search List results, and Product Browsing behavior.

Category serves as a means to organise products in meaningful groups; categories can then be organized in a tree like structure. With DWA Commerce there is no limit to the number of categories that you can create for your WebFront; you can also nested categories to any level where each category can be associated with multiple parent categories. DWA Commerce also supports special categories like Best Sellers, Most Popular, What’s New and Quick Add that can be used to highlight products to the WebFront customers.  Business users get complete control over the catalog category hierarchy through the DWA Commerce Manager interface.

Catalog and Category Hierarchies

Before we move forward with Categories, it is important for us to understand how Store Catalog and category hierarch is maintained in DWA Commerce.

In DWA Commerce, every store is associated to a Catalog that is used to manage the collection and hierarchy of categories.

 A category in DWA Commerce primarily serves the following purpose:

  1. Group and display products on the eCommerce storefront. These categories are of type “Catalog” and grouped under WebSite Root. The Category tree structure under the “WebSite Root” defines main menu of the storefront. DWA Commerce allows unlimited number of categories to be created and nesting of categories to any level (please note that the storefront theme may however limit the depth of nested categories that will be displayed on the WebFront). DWA Commerce also allows you to display a category in more than one place in the category tree structure.  For eg: you can have a Camera category under the Electronics category as well as Outdoor Activities category.
  2. Highlight a group of products on the store front such as “New Arrivals”, “Season’s Special”, a Special Collection, etc. The usage of these Special categories varies from theme to theme and may also require customization to your theme.
  3. Define the tax slab that each of the product falls under. These categories are also created by the DWA Admin team as the time of your site setup.

The eCommerce store supports hierarchies of category browsing. Each hierarchy has a parent category that acts as the starting point for category navigation. Parent categories may have product listings and any number of child categories configured under them. Child categories may contain products, have any number of parents and have one or more child categories under them. There is one special parent category that defines the top most navigation point for all eCommerce store catalogs. This category is called the "WebSite Root" category and it is used as the starting point for all browser navigation for the catalog. The "WebSite Root" category has no products in it. It has only one or more child categories. Manipulating category hierarchies makes it easy to automatically reconfigure catalogs by adding and removing single catalogs or entire hierarchies without rebuilding the catalog.

To display the category on the frontend make sure that the category you want to display is rollup to “WebSite Root” category as its parent category or to any category which is under the “WebSite Root” category.