Categories

Categories make up the tree that customers browse in the store. You use them to choose where each product belongs and which URL it gets.

Views

The admin page at Catalog → Categories has two views, and you use a switch to move between them. One view is for managing the categories you already have, and the other lists Google's product taxonomy for importing the categories that match the catalog.

A product needs at least one category before it can be published, so every product on the storefront has a place in the tree.

Google product taxonomy

Browse to add

Turn on Browse to add to explore Google's product taxonomy, which has roughly 5,500 nodes.

Branches

Open the branches and select the categories you need.

Litestore only loads the taxonomy when you switch to that view, so managing existing categories stays fast regardless of the taxonomy's size.

Using the taxonomy is optional. Categories you create yourself appear in the same tree as the imported ones.

Category tree

Each category can have a parent.

Litestore builds the storefront URL from the category's full path through the tree, so the place where you nest a category is also where customers find it.

When you rename a category, Litestore redirects the old path to the new one. Links that customers have saved and pages that search engines have indexed continue to work.

Category fields

Field	What it does
Name and slug	Names the category and sets its part of the URL.
Display label	Shows an optional alternative label.
Description	Describes the category on its page.
Icon or illustration	Appears next to the category on the storefront's `/categories` page.
Parent	Places the category in the tree.
Products	Links the products that belong to the category.

Category pages and SEO

Every category gets its own storefront page, and Litestore builds the page's URL from the category's full path through the tree.

The page shows breadcrumbs and the category's products, and Litestore adds collection structured data for search engines. Its search-result title and description default to the category's name and description; the assistant can set an override.

Every top-level category is also listed with its icon on the storefront's /categories page.

Translations

To translate a category, ask the assistant for a translation of its name, description and search fields into a language you've enabled. The admin has no translation editor.

The canonical path stays the same. The translation gets its own localized path, so adding a language doesn't change the URL that the original category already had.

Quick reference

Build or import the tree before you publish products. A category is one of the five things a product needs before it can be published, and a product without one remains in draft.

Nest categories the way customers browse, because the path through the tree becomes the storefront URL.

Use the Google taxonomy if standard category names suit the catalog, and create your own categories if they don't.

Every published product needs a category. Litestore uses the category tree to generate URLs and breadcrumbs and to run the publish checks.

Products

A product's options build its variant grid, and the product has to meet a set of rules before it's published. Add-on and related links connect it to other products.

Collections

Collections differ from categories and tags, come in four types and publish on a schedule if you set one.