Category Manager

Hey everyone. In this video, I want to

talk about product categories and how

we're going to use them in our product

taxonomy.

So, for people that have been using

Shopify for a while, you realize that

product categories are newer in the

Shopify platform. Before categories were

around, we use product types a lot. We

would classify the product types and use

that to create collections. And then

categories started showing up. And

categories is actually a internetwide

standard, a list of categories. There's

about 10,000 of them. And the thing with

uh the product types is they're just a

data element that stands alone. A

product category is part of a tree

structure. So you can see here right now

the category is listed as candy and

chocolate, but that's under food items,

which is under food, beverages, and

tobacco. So there's a hierarchy behind

them. So they're a little more

structured which makes them more useful.

Um so here you can pick one category for

a product just like you can have one

type for a product. But you also see

this purple text here and when you see

purple in the Shopify admin you see it

says suggested that's the Shopify AI

recommending an improvement to the

category that was selected. So you can

see here right now it's currently

selected as candy and chocolate in the

uh category but it's saying what about

chocolate which is a level below candy

and chocolate. There's candy and

chocolate and it says you know these are

chocolatecovered caramels. We recommend

that this is chocolate. Let's classify

it that way. And I agree with them. So

I'm going to accept their suggestion.

And now I'm going to save that

suggestion.

So, we've now changed the category that

this product falls in. But to do this

for every product in your catalog one by

one becomes a lot of work, especially if

you have, you know, 10,000 products in

your catalog. And that's where we're

trying to in data give you tools so you

can do things in mass or in bulk more

easily.

So, here is a dataf file for that same

store. Uh what I did to start off with

when you go to the top of datafy there's

a manage category section I'm just going

to say create configuration

and what we're going to do is we're

going to create a configuration which is

a set of rules how we want to manage our

product taxonomy.

So I'm going to show you some examples

of things that we do in here. Um the

first one is there are products with no

set category and we're going to add

categories to those. And then there's

also products that are currently listed

as unau or uncatategorized and we're

going to validate if they should be uh

in that state. So what I'm going to do

is I'm going to first click on the no

set category and open them up in the

bulk editor. In the Shopify bulk editor,

the product editor,

we've got the category showing here as

one of the fields and you can see all

the purples. So, it's recommending

uh categories for me. Now, to accept one

of those, I just have to click on it and

then click again on the little check to

accept the uh recommendation. Now, I

could say no, I want to do something

else. Um, and then here it brings me up

the whole list. So then you can type any

element you want in and see the options

that match it from that full list of

10,000 uh taxonomy elements for

categories. Now I'm going to go through

the rest of this, but I'm not going to

have you watch that. So I'm going to

pause the video and then come back when

I'm done.

All right, I've gone through and uh

updated the product category based on

the recommendation and evaluating that

recommendation for the 130 or so 120 uh

products that needed it.

So that's uh step one there is going

through on the uh

not set category. I'm just going to

refresh the page to have it uh update.

Now I can see that not set is no longer

showing because there's no content for

it. Um because we categorized all of

them. Now I'm going to do the same thing

for the uncatategorized.

Now some of these may stay

uncatategorized because there are things

that you may be having in your Shopify

store that don't map to the standard

taxonomy of the 10,000 categories. So in

that case, you can leave it as

uncatategorized or set it to something

that is the next closest thing. No right

or wrong there. Your choice to make. So

on this one here, you know, these, you

know, I know these here, I'm going to

make those uh gift baskets

because these are holiday bundles.

And once again, I'm going to go through

and edit them all. And uh I'll be back

when I'm done with that.

All right, I've updated those product

categories. We're going to close that

out once again. We're going to go and

open up the configuration again.

And the uncatategorized should go away

over a little bit of time.

You can see here we only have one

product left as uncatategorized. Test

product, even though it's still showing

more of them in there. Um, oh, now now

it's updated. Sometimes takes the

servers a few seconds to update things.

So now what we want to do is we want to

look at and if we hit this plus button

up here, it'll expand all the nodes or I

can expand and contract an individual

node. And right now we're only showing

nodes in the text. Remember said there's

like 10,000 nodes. We're only showing

them that we have a product category set

to from one of our products in this

store. If we wanted to, we could show

all nodes.

And there's a lot more going on there.

So very few stores are going to operate

in the show all mode. Now here to

explain a couple things that are going

on, I'm just going to expand the whole

thing. So remember I said there was a

tree structure. Arts and entertainment,

party and celebration, gift giving,

greeting and note cards, greeting cards.

So this whole tree structure behind it.

And over here we show the count of

products that map to that category. And

you know we're showing arts and

entertainment even though nothing maps

to it because it's apparent of the

greeting and note cards that has

products mapping to it. Now what we're

going to do here um is we're going to

look at each of the nodes and ask

ourselves, you know, what do we want to

do with this node? For example, I've got

some products under greeting and note

cards, and I've got others under the

child category of greeting cards, and

I'm going to make the decision right now

that I'm going to put everything under

the greeting and note cards elements.

So, I'm going to click on this little

gear icon for greeting cards. And what

we're going to do is we're going to say,

hey, I want to force this to roll up to

the parent. Right? So in a tree

structure, this is the child and the one

above it is the parent. So if I want all

greeting cards to be automatically

turned into category of greeting and

note cards, I'm just going to take this

and say, "All right, we're going to

force this up to the parent or roll it

up to the parent, we call it.

And now when I close that, I'm going to

save it."

So we've saved this configuration and

now I'm going to run the configuration.

And the only thing in this configuration

right now that's that's a defined action

is this one here. You can see the gear

icon is kind of hollow until we set an

action to it and then it's it's solid.

So now we're going to run our

configuration.

And it tells me, hey, three products are

going to be rolled up from greeting

cards to greeting and note cards. Yes.

Let's run that configuration.

So now that it's run, we're going to

refresh again. And it may show the

elements rolled up or it may take us a

minute or two for it to show up. So now

there we go. The 31 has changed to 34

because the three have rolled up. And

then another thing we can do is for

greeting and note cards, we say, "Yeah,

this is a valid node in our taxonomy."

We can select this and say keep this

category. You know, this is an

acceptable category for me. And one of

the reasons for that is what you want to

see when you're done with this whole

process is all these gears turned into

solid gears. All the hollow gears. For

example, we don't want anything at the

top level of the uh that category of

arts and entertainment.

So, we could say, "Hey, we're going to

want to take action on this." We're just

flagging um a note to ourselves. If

anything comes in and gets assigned the

arts and entertainment category, we'll

be telling ourselves, hey, we need to

look at that. So, let's save that. And

you can see as we start setting actions,

here's the notify or the take action

icon. This is the keep the category

icon. So, you start seeing icons for the

different actions. Now, let's walk

through all the actions and talk about

what each of them is.

So, this one here says, "I don't want to

use this category in my store." Um, now

the interesting thing is once you start

looking at the categories that are

available, all 10,000 of them, you end

up with, you know, the store I'm working

in right now is they just sell

chocolates and a couple things related

to chocolates, but they're a chocolate

shop, right? and they end up having some

things in the health and beauty category

because they have chocolate lip balm,

for example, and chocolate soap. So, you

end up having products pretty spread

across the uh the category. Like, you

might not think you have office

supplies, but then you start realizing,

oh, I've got packing materials for

insulated shipping of chocolates in the

summertime. Those show up under office

supplies. So, really check. And that's

why we're showing you the products and

allowing you to click on any of the

products in a category to see what is

falling under that. And you can ask

yourself, oh, that does belong there.

That's okay. Um,

so going back to the actions we can

take, we can exclude and say, no, that

category is definitely never going to be

in my store. We can also force the

products down a level. So force it to a

child or a leaf note. We can roll it up

to parent. I showed you how that worked

already. You can also migrate to a

sibling. So a sibling is the same child,

you know, two childs under the same

parent. So you could say, hey,

everything is classified in this type of

thing, you know, candy, make it

chocolate instead.

And then we can migrate to another

category anywhere in the taxonomy. We

can keep the category or we can mark it

to take action. So you have all these

different options that you're defining

for what you're going to do with your

taxonomy of all the categories and the

tree structure behind them. Some of them

take action right now, others of them

flag you to take action in the future

and then we give you tools to follow up

on those inside of the datafi app. So

that's the beginning understanding

hopefully for you of how you can manage

your categories with our ma category

manager configuration inside of the

datafi app. Thanks for listening.