Categories are how you turn a long list of products into something your customers can actually navigate — they find what they need in a couple of clicks, and you spend a lot less time hunting through your product list on the back end.
In this article
- How Categories Work
- Assign a Product to a Category
- Edit and Delete Categories
- Control your Catalog Layout
- Limit Category Visibility
- Hide Categories that are Under Construction
- When to reach out
How Categories Work
The whole point of categories is to keep your customers from scrolling through an overwhelming wall of products. Instead of seeing everything at once, they narrow down to exactly what they need — and that's what gets them ordering on their own.
Categories can be layered on top of one another, so you can get as organized as your catalog needs. Here's what it looks like from your customer's side:
- They land on the order page and see your top-level categories — for example, "Doors," "Drawer Boxes," "Hardware."
- They click into one and see any sub-categories beneath it — "Doors" might break into "Solid Wood Doors" and "Engineered Panel Doors."
- They pick a sub-category and see only the products that live there.
That layered structure keeps things clean and lets customers find what they're after without any hand-holding from you.
Assign a Product to a Category
Once your categories are set up, you'll want each product showing up in the right place. This is simpler than it sounds — it's just a checkbox.
Go to the individual product and, in the sidebar, check the box for the category (or sub-category) you want it to appear in. Then save — don't skip that part.
⚙️ → E-Commerce → Products → [Select Product] → Category sidebar
Check the box for each category you want this product to appear in, then save.
A product can live in more than one category if that's useful — just check all the boxes that apply.
Edit and Delete Categories
As your catalog grows, you'll want to rename or reorganize things, and that's totally normal. Here's where to do it.
Head to your Categories list and click the category in the sidebar. From there you can edit its name and settings, or remove it entirely with the "Delete this category" button in the bottom-left corner.
⚙️ → E-Commerce → Categories → [Select Category]
Edit a category's name and settings here, or delete it from the bottom-left.
One thing to watch before you delete: make sure no products are assigned to that category and about to lose their organization. If you're just freshening things up, renaming a category is usually the safer move.
Control your Catalog's Layout
How your catalog flows and how it looks are controlled by two different settings. They work together, so it's worth knowing both.
Priority Sort — the order things appear. Every category and every product has a priority sort setting, and lower numbers surface first. Set it on both your categories and your individual products to get the exact sequence you want. This priority sort is found instead each category and product. 
Order Page Columns in Theme — how many products fit across the page. Your catalog's visual layout is set by the Order Page Columns. The default fits 6 images across; other options space the images out larger to fill the width. It's worth playing with a few to find what feels right for your catalog.
⚙️ ➡️ Admin ➡️ Theme ➡️ Order Page Columns
Limit Category Visibility
Restricting category visibility does not inherently remove the opportunity for the customer to manually search the product by name in the catalog.
Sometimes you don't want every category in front of every customer — maybe it's customer-specific pricing, a specialty line, or something you're not ready to show broadly. You can restrict any category to specific companies.
When you're editing a category or product, look for the exclusivity setting. From there you can limit visibility to a single company, or use tags to target a whole group. Any company carrying the matching tag will see it; everyone else won't.
Tags are the most scalable way to handle this. Set the tag on the product once, then assign it to any company you want to have access — you won't have to touch the product again as your customer list grows.
Excluding a product from one specific company
Here's where I want to be transparent: the exclusivity system is built to grant access, not restrict it. So if you need to hide one product from a single company while keeping it visible to everyone else, there's no clean switch for that yet. There is a workaround, but it's a manual one:
- Create a tag — something like
exclude_company_x. - Assign that tag to every product except the one Company X should see.
- Assign that same tag to every company except Company X.
It works, but it's upfront effort, and you'll have to repeat it for each new product or company you add. If you find yourself doing this a lot, flag it for your Customer Success Manager — that's useful for us to know.
Hiding Categories that are Under Construction
When you're still building out a product or category, you don't want customers stumbling onto a half-finished version. The simplest fix is to make it exclusive to your own company while you work on it.
That keeps it invisible to customers, but you can still pull it up on the order page to test. To see your own exclusive items, select your company name from the dropdown in the order page sidebar — that surfaces anything restricted to just you.
When to Reach Out
Categories seem simple at first and get nuanced fast as your catalog grows — that's normal. If you're not sure how to structure things, or you hit a situation these settings don't quite cover, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. We've seen a lot of catalog setups, and we can help you find the cleanest path forward.