Categories & shop organization
Group products so customers can browse fast. Auto-generated by what you sell.
Watch0:463 min readUpdated 1 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 → type a name and tap Add Category. Optionally choose a Top-level category to nest it under something existing. Five to ten top-level categories is right for most shops; more than fifteen makes your home page unusable — nest the rest instead.
Put products in them
Open a product and, in the Organization section, 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 Mainbadge: 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
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). That order is the order on your shop page and home page, and the eye button beside it hides a category from the page you are looking at. 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. 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.
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.
| 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. A few designs draw their own browse menu (Pulse, HearWell, ValueKart and the catalogue designs), so these controls do not appear there — they do not need them.
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.
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 Googlecard 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.
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.
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