Categories & shop organization
Group products so customers can browse fast. Auto-generated by what you sell.
Watch0:443 min readUpdated 22 Oct 2026
In this guide
How categories work
- You create categoriesSarees · Snacks · Gifts
- Products join themUp to 8 each, first = main
- Your website builds itselfPills, tiles, menus, pages
- Google finds each pageOne address per category
Every category — and every sub-category — gets its own page at an address like yoursite.com/category/sarees/, listing everything in it. Your shop page shows category pills to filter by, your home page can show a “Shop by Category” row of tiles, and designs with a browse menu build it from the same list. None of that is set up by hand.
Setting them up
Create your categories
Categories → under Add New Category type a name and tap Add Category. The box beside the name reads Top-level category; pick Inside Electronics (or any other) to nest the new one under it. Five to ten top-level categories is right for most shops; more than fifteen makes your home page unusable — nest the rest instead.
On a few designs (restaurants among them) a category cannot exist without a product, so the button reads Add & Create Product and opens a new product with that category already picked.
Put products in them
Open a product and, under Categories on the card at the top, tap Add a category — pick from your list or type a new name and press Enter to create it. A product can sit in up to eight. The first chip carries a Main badge: that is the one used for the product's breadcrumb, its shipping rules and its search listing. Tap any other chip to make it the main one.
Doing this for a hundred products? Tick them on the Products page and use the bulk Category action instead.
Put them in the order customers think in
Until you touch it, categories show most-products-first. Open Display order & visibility on the Categories page and use the up/down arrows on each row (on a computer you can drag them instead). The tabs choose where the order applies — All pages, or just the Homepage, the Shop page or the Mobile menu — and the eye button hides a category there (on All pages it hides it everywhere). Show first … categories on the homepage sets how many tiles the home page shows (blank = 8). A hidden category still has its page and its products still sell — it is only left out of that list. Most-wanted first almost always wins.
Give each one a photo (optional but worth it)
Every category card has a photo banner with a camera button. Set one and your live site updates on its own. You can also attach a photo in the assistant's chat (the chat in your dashboard) and say which category it is for — it shows a card, and once you confirm it the Categories page shows the new photo straight away. Skip it and we use the first product photo from that category — which is fine, just less deliberate. To go back to the automatic photo later, tap the Custom image × chip.
Where a category's products can be delivered
Every category card carries a Delivers: line — “Everywhere” until you change it. Tap it to keep that category's products only in some areas (your district, your state, around your PIN code, a rate zone, a Delivery Days route, or a place you draw) or everywhere except some. A product with its own choice keeps it; everything else in the category follows. Renaming or deleting the category carries its rule along. The full picture, with what customers see: Where you deliver.
Nesting them into a tree
The Subcategories panel turns a flat list into a tree, the way a big marketplace does — Electronics → Mobiles → Accessories. You can nest up to five levels deep, and your storefront follows automatically. The panel shows on store designs that have category pages; a restaurant menu and the car dealer design keep a flat list, so it is not offered there.
| Where | What nesting changes |
|---|---|
| Top menu | Designs with a browse menu show top-level categories with their children in a dropdown |
| Phone menu | “Shop by Category” becomes a two-part row: tap the name to open it, tap the arrow to expand its children |
| Category pages | A parent page shows a breadcrumb, tiles for its children, and every product from the whole branch — open “Electronics” and you see phones and laptops |
| Filters and search | Filtering by a parent matches everything nested under it |
Per category you can also write a short line that shows under the breadcrumb, and choose whether the page leads with sub-category tiles or straight to products. Move re-nests a category, and deleting a parent simply lifts its children up one level — products are never lost.
Put each product in its most specific category only. A gaming laptop belongs in “Gaming Laptops”; the Electronics and Laptops pages include it automatically. Tagging it into all three just makes your own list harder to manage.
The Storefront menu controls at the bottom of the same panel let you hide the desktop category menu or change its look — Clean, Pills, Underline or Dark. The menu shows up to ten top categories in one row with All categories → at the end; when the names are too long to fit the screen, the last ones move into a More menu instead of running off the edge. A few designs draw their own browse menu (Pulse, HearWell, ValueKart, Zari and the catalogue designs), so these controls do not appear there — they do not need them. On Zari the categories are the header’s main menu; Site Settings → Header & Nav → Main menu on computers switches it to your pages.
Why a category is not showing on your website
Almost always the same reason: it has no products in it yet. Empty categories are deliberately kept off your live site so customers never tap a tile into an empty page. Your dashboard still shows it, marked empty, until something joins it. A parent counts as having products when any of its children do.
A category page lists its products newest first — unless you put some products first under Arrange products: those lead the Shop page and their own category pages, in your order.
Category pages and Google
Each category page is a real page with its own address, its own title and description, its own photo for link previews, and the trail of where it sits in your shop. Over time these rank for searches like “your brand + sarees” or “bridal collection in your city” — often better than your home page does.
Every category card has a Google & sharing button. It opens Title in Google, Description in Google and a Share image (WhatsApp / Facebook preview) for that category’s page, with a How it looks on Google card that redraws as you type. Each box shows, greyed, what the page says while you leave it empty: the category name with your shop name, the category’s own description, its photo. Press Save on the panel; your live site updates on its own.
Do not change a category's web address after you launch. Once Google has indexed /category/shoes/, renaming it to /category/footwear/ makes the old address stop working and you lose whatever it had earned. Get the names right at the start; if you must change one later, set up a redirect — see URL redirects.
Naming them well
Do this
- Use the words your customers say — “Sarees”, not “Women's Ethnic Drapes”
- Five to ten at the top level, everything else nested underneath
- One seasonal category when it earns its place (“Diwali gifting”), removed after
- A photo per category once you have more than a handful
- Most-wanted category first in the order
Not this
- One giant category called “Products”
- A category per brand and per size and per colour — those are filters, not aisles
- Creating twenty categories before you have twenty products
- Renaming a category's address after Google has found it
- Leaving empty categories around waiting for stock
Example · Sneha, a home-décor store in Pune
She started with nineteen flat categories and a home page nobody scrolled past. She cut it to six aisles — Living, Bedroom, Kitchen, Lighting, Gifting, Sale — and nested the rest underneath. Same products, same photos; customers now find the room they are shopping for in one tap, and her Kitchen category page brings more Google visitors than her home page.
Related
| You want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| Add and edit the products inside them | Add & edit products |
| Choose which rows show on your home page | Homepage sections |
| Change the menu and the phone drawer | Header & Footer |
| Keep an old address working after a rename | URL redirects |
| See what customers searched for and found nothing | Search insights |
Common questions
Can one product be in more than one category?
Yes, up to eight. The first chip is its main category and decides its breadcrumb, its shipping rule and how it is listed for search — tap another chip to promote it.
Do I need to publish after adding a category?
No. Category changes reach your live site on their own within a few seconds, including the photo.
What happens when I rename a category?
Everything that carried the old name moves with it in one go: every product in it (as its main category or one of its other categories), the category picture, its order and visibility, its subcategories, its delivery area, its per-category delivery charge and any coupon limited to it. A name that already exists is refused — to merge two categories, move the products into one of them instead. The category page’s web address changes with the name (see the tip above about old links). You can also ask Asha in the chat — “rename Shoes to Footwear” — and her card shows everything that will move before anything changes; its Undo puts the old name back. If your store sells a supplier’s products, a category those products use is your supplier’s and cannot be renamed here — move your own products into a new category instead.
How do I delete a category I no longer use?
On the Categories screen, tap the bin button on that category’s card, then Yes, Delete. Only the category goes: its products stay in your shop (with no category, or with their other categories), and any subcategories under it move up one level.
I deleted a parent category. Did I lose the ones under it?
No — they move up one level and keep all their products. Nothing is deleted except the category name you removed.
Can customers still search across everything?
Yes. Search always looks at your whole catalogue; categories are for browsing, not for limiting search.
How deep can I nest?
Five levels. In practice two is enough for almost every shop and three is plenty — every extra level is one more tap between a customer and a product.
More in Products & orders
Did this answer your question?
It takes one tap and it genuinely changes what we write next.