Putting your products into categories allows customers to efficiently find their way to the right products

through your webstore navigation menu.  Categorisation is something many online merchants don't pay enough attention to and unfortunately end up making the customer journey unnecessarily complicated.  Keep it simple.  Here are a few tips from our web design and data experts:


  • Be professional - use Title Case where each word commences with upper case and the rest are in lower case, except for acronyms which would usually be in all upper case.  Title Case is much easier to read fast than block letters (upper case).  Even if you choose to display category names on your webstore in upper case, this can be controlled in the CSS coding, but if you enter your categories in upper case you lose te flexibility of being able to vary it for different channels.  Remember to check spelling too.


  • Keep it simple - Keep category names short.  The less words, the easier it is for customers to take it in quckly and make good choices.  The more words, the more clutter and noise in the customer's mind, and therefore the more difficult to identify what they're looking for.


  • Product Types only - Categories should be product types only.  It may be tempting to make categories for colours, materials, brands etc, but these are all product attributes, not product types.  Product attributes need to be added to your SKU records as specifics or in the dedicated fields allocated for them (such as Brand).


  • Leaf level categories - Picture your category structure as an upside down tree.  Products must always sit on the leaves, and never on a branch or the trunk.  Leaf level categories are the most granular and specific, and will be required for mapping to marketplace categories too.  NEVER put products in a category that has subcategories below it. On your website, if a customer clicks a parent category link in the menu, they will be shown all products in all of the subcategories below it.


  • If in doubt go deeper - If you aren't sure whether you need to break your products down into more granular subcategories, you probably should. It's better to be too specific than to broad. If you're not specific enough, you will have difficulties mapping accurately to marketplace categories.


Product Categories can be created in your ZELLIS Connect Maropost Commerce Cloud dashboard manually one by one, or via bulk upload.  You can even create categories and subcategories as you import new product records by setting Maropost Commerce Cloud's import wizard to create any categories that don't already exist.


Learn more about Product Categorisation here: 


As a ZELLIS Connect merchant, you are entitled to training on all aspects of the platform.  If you need further assistance, please request a training session now and we'll be in touch to arrange a suitable time.