Manage Categories

Creating, editing and managing your Categories

Creating, editing and managing categories allow for you to classify which section of your inventory and webpages your products fall under. For example, it will allow for you to take a particular piece of clothing and assign it a category such as "Athletic Wear" and "Athletic Footwear". To begin doing this, we start from the Manage Categories section of Store Operations as shown below.

Create Categories & Subcategories

Main Categories and Subcategories are created in the screen we just navigated to. A main category will be something labeled as Inventory or Services possibly, as shown in the image below. The categories located within the main categories are referred to as Subcategories. These can be something such as "Clothing" or "Athletic Wear" and placed in your "Inventory" main category.

Clicking on "Add Category" will allow for you to create more "Main Categories". As shown in the image above, simply fill in the name of the category then hit on the Save Button.

The same goes for adding "Sub-Categories". Simply click on the Main Category you would like the Sub-Category to be added to and click "Add Category" button. Fill in the same information and you are done!

Main Categories - Why they Matter

MicroBiz Cloud & Magento allow the retailer flexible categories for products that are helpful to both retailers and their customers. A single product can belong to both a sneakers and a basketball categories. But many times we will want to be able to view inventory activity in a way that doesn't omit any products and never counts any of the products twice.

If we are counting sales - or even exporting sales to our General Ledger we wouldn't want to count the sale of a sneaker twice in both the sneaker and basketball categories. Nor would we want to omit any sales because a product had no category. For this reason we designate one root category as the inventory root category and one root category as the non-inventory root category. Each product has to belong to at least one 'main category' under the root inventory (or non-inventory) category.

How you approach your primary categories is particular to your business but as a guideline how you think about your inventory when you are planning your seasonal or annual buying budget is probably a good start.