We’re constantly looking at ways to make managing and merchandising your Zoey store easier. Coming off the heels of a round of updates to our Bundled Product type, our development team took a look at category management.

Recent updates to Zoey have targeted the ability to manage and merchandise categories on your Zoey site. New additions to the admin simplify how you manage products within a category. And adjustments to settings can how determine how categories are displayed and behave to customers on the front end. Today’s post will dive in to each of those improvements and how you can use them.

Bulk Management of Product Category Assignment

Adding products to categories was a somewhat manual process in the admin previously. You could add it product by product, or in the category management you could had a handful at a time. For true bulk additions, you would have had to use a CSV file.

We’ve fixed that with two ways to add products in bulk:

• On the Product Screen: You can how use a bulk action to add multiple selected products to a category. Check off all products, then select “Bulk Actions” and choose “Assign To Category.” Then you can use the search or “Category Tree” interface to select one or multiple categories.

  

• On the Category Screen: Search for products, select the checkbox in the headers to select all the products found. You’ll see in the green bar an option to Select All, which covers every product surfaced in the search. Then select “Add Selected to Category” to complete the process.

  

Managing the Category Experience for Customers

We’ve also added settings to offer our merchants more control over how their categories present to users on the front end. All of these changes relate to settings on the Category blocks in the Visual Design Editor.

• Hide Specific Categories: As a merchant you may want to build hidden categories for a variety of reasons – hidden categories may allow for certain merchandising opportunities, or be used in an email to promote certain merchandise, but isn’t designed to be publicly navigable. In those cases, you can select to not show certain categories within the navigation and category sidebars. Simply select “Specific Categories” to be presented with the list. Uncheck the ones you don’t want and then save/publish to see your changes reflected on the store.

  

• Hide Other Categories’ Subcategories: When customers are navigating into a certain category, you still want to include a navigation option to make it easier to find other products, but you may want to focus their attention on the category at hand. You can hide subcategories of the non-selected category, so they will only see the choices within the category they’re in, keeping them focused on the task at hand. We don’t recommend doing this everywhere, but on the category page this can be a helpful way to simplify the navigation of your site.

  

• Category Display in Filters: You can now select to eliminate certain categories from the search filters, and whether price filters are present on a given category. All of th settings can be found in the category settings when you select one:

  

Constantly Changing for You

Zoey releases new features and bug fixes nearly every day, and we’re transparent about the work we’re doing to make it a better Ecommerce solution for our merchants. See what w’eve been doing lately, or contact us for a demo of Zoey to see if it’s right for your business: