Custom Categories for Organizing a Store's Catalog

A seller asked for categories of their own, so that a catalog can be browsed the way its buyers actually think about it. Their example is a motorcycle gear store: by brand on one axis, and by product line, helmets, gloves, boots, jackets, accessories, on the other. The request is that navigation stays usable as the number of published products grows, which is exactly the point at which the current arrangement stops working.

Today the taxonomy belongs to the platform, not to the store. A product is filed under one entry from a fixed list of general categories and their subcategories, the same list for every store on Shourly. That list is what the storefront's category filter is built from, so a store's navigation is a projection of a catalog-wide taxonomy rather than of its own inventory. A seller cannot add an entry, cannot rename one, and cannot file a product under more than one. There is no notion of a brand anywhere in the product model.

The consequence is that some catalogs have no honest home. Helmets, gloves and riding boots have no entry to be filed under, and neither do the brands that a buyer would search by first. Whatever the seller picks is approximate, and every product in the store ends up sharing it, which leaves the category filter offering a single option, no navigation at all. Specifications are free text and can hold a brand, but they are not filterable, so that information cannot become a way to browse.

Planned change. Stores get categories of their own, created and named by the seller. A product may belong to several of them at once, so brand and product line can coexist without duplicating anything: one helmet can be both Airoh and Helmets. They appear as filters on the storefront and as entry points into the catalog, and they are indexed for search alongside the existing filters. The platform-wide category stays where it is, it is what makes a product findable outside its own store, and the store's own categories sit on top of it.