Categories and attributes
Organising the catalog so people can find things.
Categories are how customers browse. Attributes are how a product turns into variants. They are set up separately, and both are worth doing before you add many products.
Categories
Categories nest — a parent with children, for example Clothing → Shirts. Each has its own image and SEO fields, so a category page can rank on its own rather than only funnelling from the home page.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | What customers see. |
| Parent | Leave blank for a top-level category. |
| Image | Used on category tiles on your home page. |
| Meta title / description | For search results. |
Fewer, broader categories beat many narrow ones at the start. A category with two products in it looks like an empty shop. You can always split one later; merging is harder.
Categories are not navigation
Creating a category does not put it in your menu. Menus are built separately, under Navigation — see Pages and navigation. This is deliberate: you often want a category to exist and be linked from a page or a campaign without cluttering the main menu.
Attributes
An attribute is a property with a set of values — Size with S, M, L, XL, or Colour with the colours you stock. Define it once under Attributes and reuse it on every product.
How variants are generated
On a product, pick the attributes that apply and the values you stock. The combinations become variants. Two attributes with three values each give nine variants, each with its own SKU, price, weight and stock.
Only tick values you actually stock. Selecting every colour "to be safe" generates dozens of variants you then have to price, weigh and set to zero stock — and any you forget become buyable.
Naming them well
- Be consistent: Colour everywhere, not Colour on one product and Color on another. They are different attributes and customers see both.
- Use the customer's words. Navy, not PMS 289.
- Keep sizes in a sensible order — S, M, L, XL, not alphabetical.
Do this first
Attributes before products. Adding a variant dimension to a product that already has orders against it is messy; getting it right at the start costs nothing.
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