Categories group your products, for example into courses, coaching and merchandise. They keep a growing catalog easy to browse in the admin, and they let a product showcase on a hub or dashboard show one group of products instead of all of them.
If Payments is off in your workspace, switch it on under Settings > Features first. Seeing categories takes the permission View Payments. Creating, changing, assigning and deleting them takes Manage Catalog (Products, Prices, Coupons).
Where are categories?
Categories have no page of their own. They live above the product list under Payments > Catalog > Products. Click the folder button labeled Categories in the toolbar to show or hide the category strip. The list remembers whether it was open.
The strip starts with All products, then shows each category with the number of products in it, and ends with No category for products that have none yet. Click a category to show only its products, and click it again to see everything. The categories in the strip are sorted by name.
How do I create a category?
Click the gear button Manage categories at the end of the strip, then Add category. Fill in:
- Name: required.
- Category URL: filled in from the name if you leave it empty. If the URL
is already taken in your workspace, a number such as
-1is added to it. - Description: optional.
- Parent: leave it on "No parent" for a top level category, or pick another category to make this one a subcategory.
- Active: on by default, see below.
You can also create a category while editing a product, see below.
How do I assign products?
Open a product and go to Categories. Tick every category the product belongs to. A product can sit in several categories at once, and Save stores the choice.
The hierarchy stays consistent on its own. Selecting a subcategory also selects its parent categories, and clearing a parent also clears its subcategories.
One of the selected categories is the primary one, shown with the label Primary. Use Make primary to change it. If you do not choose, the first selected category becomes primary.
When the category you need does not exist yet, click Add Category right in this section. A name that is already taken is refused with "A category with this name already exists."
To see which products are in a category, open it with Edit from its menu in the strip and click Show products of category. The product list then opens filtered to that category.
What do categories do outside the admin?
A product showcase on a hub or dashboard can pick its products by category. Choose Category as the source and select one or more categories. The showcase then lists the live, public products in them. Only active categories are offered there.
Whether a category is active is set with the Active switch when you create or edit it. Switch it off to take a category out of the showcase choices and out of the product's Categories section without deleting it. A showcase that already uses an inactive category shows none of its products.
Edit and delete
Each category in the strip has a menu with Edit and Delete. Edit opens Edit Category with the same fields and the Active switch.
Deleting a category never deletes products. The dialog says it up front: "Only categories without products and without subcategories can be deleted." If products or subcategories are still attached, the category stays and the dialog names the reason. So first remove it from its products and move its subcategories to another parent.
Deleting a product, on the other hand, removes it from all its categories. The categories themselves stay.