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Adding Categories and Sub-Categories to your Online Shop
The structure of your categories and sub-categories is what determines the ease of navigation throughout your online store. It is the backbone of your site which allows users to navigate through the catalogue of products.
With ekmPowershop you essentially start off with one page known as your "home page". The first categories you add to your store will appear on your home page. Each category you add will therefore add a unique extra page. As there is no limit to the amount of categories or sub-categories that can be added, you can potentially have a very large website with many pages.
Within each category page you add, you will be given the option to add either a 'sub-category' or a 'product'. It is crucial that you think about how you want the structure of your shop to be presented to your customers.
On the one hand, it is very important not to 'clutter' the homepage with many different categories. This will cause confusion and difficult navigation if the user has a long list of categories to look through to locate a particular product. You would therefore display only the most relevant 'top-level' categories on the homepage, which would then contain relevant sub-categories to allow easy navigation for your customers.
On the other hand however, it is important not to have too many steps where users can get lost in a seemingly endless tree of sub-categories which will also cause confusion and difficult navigation.
Finding the balance of how many steps or 'clicks' it takes to locate a product is therefore very important to maintain an attractive website with user-friendly navigation. It is generally regarded as acceptable for there to be no more than three clicks before at least a page of products is reached within a sub-category.
Tutorial: Creating a category and sub-category
You can use our online demo in order to test the simple process of adding a category and a sub-category to your online store: http://www.ekmpowershop.com/ekmps/onlinedemo.asp.
Assuming you are logged into either your own account or the online demo and viewing the home page of the shop, simply follow the below steps:
- At the bottom of the page you will see three yellow buttons. These are 'Add Item', 'Your Account' and 'Hide Edit Buttons'. The 'Add Item' button is what you need to click on:
- Clicking on 'Add Item' will take you to the prompt that asks what item must be added: a category, or a product? Select 'Category'.
- You will then be taken in to the section that asks you for the information regarding that category, i.e. the category title and a short description if required (recommended). Once you are happy with the title and the short description, click 'add':
- You will then be prompted to add an image to the category. This is also recommended and will be a small image visible next to the category title where the category is listed on your home page:
- Selecting 'Yes' will prompt you to either upload an image or use one that you may have already uploaded to your ekmPowershop:
- Clicking 'upload new image' will take you through the steps in copying an image from your machine onto the ekmPowershop server to use with your category/sub-category. Clicking 'browse' will allow you to browse your machine for the image you wish to upload while clicking 'upload' will send that image to the server:
- Once the image is uploaded to the server you will see the following confirmation that the 'item' has now been added:
- Clicking 'done' will take you to the page within your site that you have added the category to. You should then see something similar to the below:
The  button will allow you to edit the title, description and image accordingly.
The  button will of course remove that category from your shop. This can only be done if there is nothing within that category.
The  button simply allows you to move that category up or down the list of categories on that page.
Tutorial: Adding a sub-category
The process for adding a sub-category is very much the same, except you must first navigate into the category itself before clicking the 'add item' button again. Using the example above, you would click on 'Shoes' to enter that category.
Once inside the category you wish to add a sub-category to, you would then click the  button once again. You will then see the following options:
Note that the option now automatically says 'sub category' instead of previously when it simply showed 'category' as an option.
Clicking 'sub category' then requires you to repeat the above steps to add the desired title, description and image for the sub-category you are adding.
The properties for sub-categories are the same as categories, in the sense that they can be edited, deleted and moved up or down the page they are located on in the same way.
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