Categories
Learn how to import categories from Google's product taxonomy, nest them into a tree, and translate them per locale.
Categories are the tree customers browse.
The admin page at Catalog → Categories has two jobs behind one switch: manage the categories you already have, or browse Google's product taxonomy and import the ones that match your catalog.
A product must have at least one category before it can be published, so the tree is not optional decoration — nothing reaches the storefront without a place in it.
Importing from Google's taxonomy
Turn on "Browse to add" and you can drill into Google's product taxonomy — roughly 5,500 nodes — selecting the categories you want.
The taxonomy is only fetched when you switch to that view. Managing the categories you already have therefore stays fast, however large the preset catalog is.
You are not restricted to the preset. Categories of your own sit in the same tree alongside imported ones.
A real tree
Each category can have a parent.
Its full path through the tree is what the storefront URL is built from, so where you nest a category is also where customers find it.
A renamed category keeps its old path working through a redirect. A link a customer saved or a page a search engine indexed does not break because you retitled something.
What a category carries
Each category holds:
- a name and slug
- an optional display label
- a description
- an icon or illustration, shown on the storefront Categories block
- its parent
- the products linked to it
Its own page and SEO
Every category has a storefront page of its own, built from its full path through the tree.
That page carries:
- breadcrumbs
- its products
- its own meta title and description
- collection structured data for search engines
The Categories block is the other place a category appears, when you want to place the groups onto a page you are composing.
Translations without moving the URL
Add a locale and give the category a translated name, label, description and meta fields.
The canonical path does not change. The translation carries its own localized path, so adding a language does not move the URL the original category already had.
Where to start
Build or import the tree before you start publishing products, because a category is one of the five things a product needs before it can be published, and a product without one stays in draft.
Nest for the way customers browse, since the path through the tree is the storefront URL.
Reach for the Google taxonomy when your catalog is ordinary enough that a standard name will do, and write your own when it is not.
A category is the one grouping a product cannot go without — get the tree right and the URLs, breadcrumbs and publish checks all follow from it.
Related
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Collections
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Tags
Learn how to import tags from the preset catalog or generate them with AI, and where tags actually change what shoppers see.