Planning product categories for an online store

Many store owners set up categories the night before launch, copying the shelf labels from their shop or the headings from a supplier's price list. It works for a few months. Then new product lines arrive, half the catalogue sits in "Other", and the menu grows sideways until it no longer fits on a phone. Planning product categories for an online store properly takes an afternoon with sticky notes or a spreadsheet, and it saves a messy restructure later.

This guide deals with the structure itself: depth, names, overlap and growth. It does not cover writing content for category pages.

Start from how customers shop, not how you stock

Your warehouse may be organised by supplier, by shelf or by import date. Customers do not care about any of that. They think in terms of what they need: "something for my kitchen", "a gift for a child", "running shoes".

Before drawing a tree, gather evidence of how buyers describe your products:

• Words used in phone calls, WhatsApp chats and walk-in questions
• Search terms typed on your site, if it is already live
• How large marketplaces group similar products, as a reference point rather than a template
• Terms people use when reviewing or asking about your products

A quick card-sorting exercise also helps. Write twenty or thirty product names on cards and ask a few customers or friends to group them and name each pile. Where most people agree, you have a natural category.

Choosing the right category depth

Depth is the number of levels between the home page and a product list. "Home > Kitchen > Cookware > Pressure cookers" is three levels deep.

Too shallow

A store with only top-level categories forces shoppers to scroll through hundreds of mixed items. "Kitchen" with 600 products is not much help.

Too deep

Five or six levels mean many taps, tiny subcategories with two products each, and menus that are painful on mobile. Shoppers lose track of where they are.

A practical middle ground

For most small and mid-sized stores, two or three levels is enough. A useful rule of thumb is that a bottom-level category should hold enough products to be worth browsing, perhaps a dozen or more, but not so many that filters cannot tame the list. When a category grows very large, split it; when a subcategory stays nearly empty, merge it with a sibling.

Naming categories in the customer's language

Category names appear in menus, breadcrumbs, page titles and URLs, so they carry a lot of weight. Good names are short, specific and familiar.

• Prefer "Water bottles" to "Hydration solutions"
• Prefer "Kurtas" to "Ethnic tops collection"
• Avoid internal codes, supplier names and in-jokes
• Use the term most customers use, even if the trade term is technically more accurate
• Keep sibling names at the same level of detail, so "Shirts" does not sit beside "Blue formal slim-fit shirts"

Where your audience mixes English and Hindi terms, it is fine to use the widely understood word. "Dupattas" and "Chappals" are clearer to many Indian shoppers than their English equivalents. Stay consistent across the whole tree.

Products that belong in more than one category

A steel lunch box might sit in Kitchen storage, in School supplies and in a Gifts section. Most platforms allow a product to be assigned to several categories, and it is usually the right call for shoppers.

A few habits keep this tidy:

1. Pick one primary category for every product. It decides the default breadcrumb and, on many platforms, the canonical product URL.
2. Keep product URLs independent of category paths where possible, such as /product/steel-lunch-box, so the same item does not exist at several addresses.
3. Use collections for occasions and themes, like "Diwali gifts" or "Back to school", rather than adding permanent categories for seasonal needs.
4. Limit extra assignments to places where a real shopper would look. Putting everything everywhere makes every category feel cluttered.

Categories versus attributes

One of the most common planning errors is turning attributes into categories. "Red sarees", "Blue sarees" and "Green sarees" should not be three categories; colour is an attribute that a filter handles. The same applies to size, material and price.

A useful test: if the characteristic applies across many product types and a shopper would want to combine it with others, it is an attribute. If it describes what the product fundamentally is, it is a category.

Planning a structure that can grow

Think about what you might sell in two years, not just today. If a stationery store plans to add art supplies, leave space for a top-level "Art and craft" branch now rather than squeezing paints under "Office supplies".

Growth checklist before launch

• Every current product fits somewhere obvious without an "Other" or "Miscellaneous" category
• Planned product lines have a logical home in the tree
• The top-level menu fits comfortably on a phone, ideally with fewer than eight items
• Category URLs are short, lowercase and do not include dates or IDs
• Someone owns the tree and approves new categories, so it does not sprawl

When a restructure does become necessary, set up 301 redirects from old category URLs to their new equivalents so bookmarks, links and search rankings carry over.

Putting your category plan on paper this week

Export your product list into a spreadsheet, add a column for primary category and another for secondary ones, and fill it in. Gaps and overcrowded groups show up quickly. Share the draft tree with a couple of regular customers before building it.

If you are starting a new shop or rebuilding an old one, we help plan category structures as part of building an online store.

Frequently asked questions

How many top-level categories should an online store have?

There is no fixed number, but many stores work well with roughly five to eight. More than that crowds the main menu, especially on mobile.

Can I change categories after launch?

Yes, but plan the redirects and update internal links. Changing names without changing URLs is simpler than moving whole branches.

Should brands be categories?

Usually brands work better as a filter or a separate "Shop by brand" section. Making them categories duplicates your product-type structure.

Is it bad to have a sale category?

A sale or offers section is fine as a collection that products join temporarily. Just keep each item's normal category assignment so it stays findable when the offer ends.