Purpose

You need to plan and create the new categories for your new products before you can import any new non-Orgill products into your transactional Impact catalog.

This help article should help you plan and create a list of new categories to hold your new products. This list will serve as a base for the hierarchy of your Non-Orgill products.

Hierarchy is a structured collection of categories and subcategories. To be displayed in the catalog, a product needs to belong to at least one category. <= Info block (blue in KB)

Considerations

Future-proofing and efficiency. You should plan all of the categories you will need for the group of products you are considering importing, not just the first category. Empty categories will not be seen by the public until they contain products; they will appear as you populate them. Therefore, don’t worry about creating your anticipated categories all at once.

Limiting the number of top-level categories: Care must be taken to create a good, representative, generic top-level category for all of the second-level categories you will be creating. You will only want to create a small number of new top-level categories, e.g., one or two, to contain all of your planned second-level subcategories. Remember: each top-level category is taking space in the Products drop-down list in the navigation; you want it to remain user-friendly.

Category Depth

You can create up to six levels of nested categories; however, two, three, or four levels deep is usually sufficient.

Example

For example, if you are loading various drywall and roofing products, you should not create the following two top-level categories:

• Drywall
• Roofing

Instead, you would probably want to create the following categories, along with appropriate subcategories for each area:

• Building Materials   <= top-level category
• Drywall   <= second-level category
• Drywall and Insulation   <= third-level category
• Drywall Sheets
• Roofing
• Roof Shingles
• Roofing Accessories

Your List

Make a list of your planned new categories, indented to reflect their level.

Using bulleted lists with indenting in a word processor, or a spreadsheet where columns represent the level, are two common ways of building your list of needed new categories.

Next Step

Once you have your list of new categories, proceed to the new help article in the Product Imports series.