Organizing products right from the beginning can help you to keep the overview in the long term. Therefore, you can group products into categories. Later, you can use these categories to easily display a specific group of products on your website. Here are some ideas for specific groups:
- Special recommendations
- New arrivals, such as products of the new spring collection
- Products of the same type, such as handbags, chairs, spare parts or sneakers
- Products on offer
You can choose between two kinds of categories: Automatic and manual categories. In this article you'll learn more about that. For more information, also refer to Add automatic categories and Add manual categories.
Automatic versus manual categories - What is the difference?
Automatic categories
As the name suggests, automatic categories include all products automatically which fit the conditions defined by you. You can use specific tags, a defined price or a certain manufacturer to filter for products which should be part of an automatic category.
The advantage of an automatic category: newly added products which match the conditions are automatically assigned to the corresponding category without any manual effort. On the other hand, this also means that products stay in an automatic category until you have changed their conditions.
Manual categories
Creating a manual category means selecting products individually, piece by piece. The category remains the same until you add or remove a product.
When to use which kind of category?
Automatic categories are especially suitable:
- If you have a wide range of products you need to continuously organize.
- For categories which always have the same conditions (example: products for less than 5€).
Manual categories are especially suitable:
- If you only have a few products in your product range.
- If you want to create a category with only some few curated products (example: featured products).
Products as part of multiple categories
No matter if two automatic categories, three manual categories or one of each - you can assign products to as many categories as you like.