Categories
The aisles shoppers browse. How groups work, why order matters, and what happens to products when a category goes away.
Categories are how shoppers navigate your store. The home screen, the browse tab and the category grid are all built from them, which is why a store needs at least one before it can be previewed.
Create them on the Categories page.
The fields
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | What shoppers see. Keep it short — templates render it in two lines at most. |
| Group | An optional heading that gathers related categories together. |
| Image | The tile artwork on the browse grid. |
Parent categories
A category can sit under another — Clothing › Shirts — by picking a Parent category in its dialog. Imports from Shopify, WooCommerce and WhatsApp catalogs build this tree automatically from their category paths. Products always attach to the category itself (usually the leaf); the tree is for organisation and for keeping an imported catalog's structure.
Groups
The Group field is the difference between a flat list of twenty categories and a browsable store. Categories sharing a group name are shown together under that heading.
Group: Grocery & Kitchen
Fresh Fruits
Vegetables
Dairy, Bread & Eggs
Atta, Rice & Dal
Group: Snacks & Drinks
Chips & Namkeen
Cold Drinks & Juices
Tea, Coffee & More
Groups aren't records you create — they're just a name you type on each category, and matching names gather. That means a typo makes a second group, so copy the exact spelling when you add the fourth category to a group.
Leave Group empty if you have fewer than about eight categories. Grouping three things under two headings adds a layer without adding navigation.
Category images
Each category shows a tile image on the browse grid. Square artwork works best; templates crop to a square and centre it.
A representative product photo usually reads better at tile size than an icon or an illustration — a shopper scanning for "Dairy" recognises a milk carton faster than a dairy glyph.
Naming
Category names are one of the few things shoppers read before they've decided to trust you.
- Say what's inside: Fresh Fruits, not Category 1.
- Match how shoppers speak, not how your supplier invoices.
- Two words beats five. Cold Drinks beats Cold Beverages & Soft Drinks, which will clip.
Deleting a category
Deleted categories sit in Recently deleted for 30 days and can be restored with one tap.
Deleting asks for confirmation and can't be undone.
Products belonging only to the deleted category become unreachable by browsing. They still exist, still appear in search, and can still be opened from a direct link — but nobody navigating your aisles will find them. Re-assign those products before deleting, or delete them too.
Import instead
Migrating a real store? Categories have a CSV importer of their own, with the same validate-everything-first behaviour as the product importer. Do categories first, then brands, then products — products reference the other two by name, and the importer won't invent a name that doesn't exist.