Organizing with Categories
Build the category tree your products belong to: creating, editing, reordering, and browsing categories.
Categories are how shoppers navigate your store — "Men's Clothing," "Accessories," "New Arrivals." A well-organized category tree makes it faster for customers to find what they want, and gives your store cleaner web addresses for search engines to index.
What you get
- A dedicated editor page for creating and editing categories, with an image, status, and parent.
- A tree or flat list view of your whole category structure.
- Drag-and-drop reordering, with an explicit save step.
- A per-category product count, with a click-through to see what's inside.
Screen: Categories
Go to Categories in the left sidebar. This lists every category you've created, with an image, its item count, and its status.
Tree/flat toggle is new-admin-panel only
On the new (v2) admin panel, a toggle at the top of the list switches between a tree view (showing parent/child nesting) and a flat view. The classic (default) admin panel doesn't have this toggle — its Categories list is always a plain flat table, with no nesting shown.
Click + New category to create one, or click any category row to open it.
Click into a category
Clicking a category opens its detail page, which lists every product currently assigned to it — useful for spot-checking that a category actually contains what you expect before you publish it widely.
What the numbers on the new Categories screen mean
On the new (v2) admin panel, each number appears once, in the summary strip under the page title.
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Page title area | No count line. Once you have at least one category, the title area shows no totals. With zero categories it says organise your shelves. |
| CHAPTERS tile | Your total number of categories. Its sub-line reads On this page: N active · N inactive, which counts only the categories listed on the current page. |
| Items on this page tile | The product counts of the categories listed on the current page, added together. Its sub-line reads Summed over the N categories listed. It shows a dash and counting items… until every listed category has been counted. |
| Top category on this page tile | The listed category with the most products, with its item count underneath. It stays a dash until all listed categories are counted. |
| UNCATEGORISED tile | Products not assigned to any category (sub-line assign to chapters). It shows a dash if the count could not be loaded. |
| all tab | No count. The three tabs are all, active, and inactive. |
| inactive tab | The only tab with a number: the store-wide count of inactive categories. |
If you have more categories than fit on one page, the page-level tiles change as you move between pages, while CHAPTERS stays the store-wide total.
The plan quota line only appears on plans with a category limit
When your plan caps the number of categories, a line above the summary strip shows N of LIMIT with an Upgrade link to your billing page. If you are over the limit it adds — N over limit. On a plan with no category limit, this line is not shown at all. Previously it read "N of Unlimited" and repeated the total.
Why don't the tile numbers add up to my category count?
CHAPTERS is store-wide, but Items on this page, Top category on this page, and the active/inactive sub-line cover only the categories on the page you are viewing. Use the pager to see the others. A category whose product count does not load in time shows a dash, and the items tile and Top category on this page wait on it rather than showing a partial sum. If the quota line is missing, your plan has no category limit.
Creating or editing a category
Click + New category (or click an existing category, then Edit) to open the category editor page.
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Name | The category name shoppers see — e.g. "Men's Clothing" |
| Slug | The web-address-friendly name (e.g. mens-clothing). Auto-generated from the name, but you can customize it |
| Description | Optional description text |
| Image | A cover image shown on category listing pages and navigation menus — drag and drop or click to upload, with a preview |
| Status | Active (visible on your storefront) or Draft (hidden while you set it up) |
| Parent category | Optional — choose an existing category to nest this one underneath, building your tree |
Click Save. A category can't be saved without a name; the Save button stays disabled until you've entered one.
SEO fields: new admin panel only
On the new (v2) admin panel, an SEO toggle (collapsed by default) reveals Meta title and Meta description fields for the category, in both the quick-create drawer and the full category editor page. On the classic (default) admin panel, the category editor has no SEO fields at all. OG image isn't exposed for editing on either version, even though it exists in the data model.
A product can belong to more than one category
A product isn't limited to a single category — a "Summer Dress" might sit under both "Dresses" and "Sale." You choose which category is the primary one when creating or editing the product itself, not from the Categories screen.
Reordering categories
Click Reorder at the top of the Categories list to enter reorder mode. Drag categories into the order you want them to appear, then click Save order to commit the change. Until you click Save, your drag-and-drop changes aren't persisted.
Product count per category
Every category row shows how many products are currently assigned to it. Click into the category to see the actual list of products behind that count — a quick way to confirm a category isn't empty, or to catch products that ended up in the wrong place.
On the storefront, category sections receive the category's image and a live product count. The
count includes active products assigned either as their primary category or as an additional
category, without counting the same product twice. An empty active category therefore shows 0,
not a missing value. Draft categories are not returned to the public storefront at all, and a
category without an image keeps the image area empty rather than borrowing another image.
Why is a category missing or its count lower than expected?
Confirm the category Status is Active, then confirm the products you expect to count are also active and assigned to that category. Draft products do not contribute to the storefront count. If the category card has no artwork, upload an Image in the category editor and save it.
For custom storefront integrations, GET /api/v1/customer/public/categories returns active
categories only. image and imageUrl contain the same URL for compatibility, or null when no
image is set; productCount is the active-product count described above.
Deleting a category
Every category row has a delete control, on both admin panel versions — confirm to permanently remove it.
- Classic (v1) admin panel: each row has its own Delete icon. Clicking it opens a confirmation dialog naming the category.
- New (v2) admin panel: open the row's kebab menu (⋮) and choose Delete — or open the category's own detail page and click Delete in the header. Either entry point opens the same kind of confirmation dialog naming the category before it's removed.
Deleting more than one at a time on v2
On the new (v2) admin panel, check the box on each category row you want to remove. A bulk-actions strip appears above the list showing how many you've selected, with a Bulk delete button that removes all of them after one more confirmation. There's no equivalent bulk-delete control on the classic admin panel — remove categories one at a time there.
Next steps
- Adding & Editing Products — assign products to the categories you've built here.
- Bulk Import & Bulk Edit — import products directly into a category by name via CSV.