Categories
Category Name
The Category name is what is displayed at the top of the category page. It will often be the longer, more descriptive version of the Navigation Name to provide a full, descriptive title for a particular category. For example, if you have a category for Large Vanilla Envelopes, instead of calling the category "Large" or "Envelopes", we would use the more descriptive title of "Large Vanilla Envelopes". Read more about setting appropriate H1s for your PLPs.
Description (aka Banner Copy)
The banner copy is the customer-facing copy at the top of your PLP. It typically contains inlinks to support browsability and helps entice provide engaging content relating to the specific category.
Navigation Name
The Navigation Name, sometimes shortened to "Nav Name", is an abbreviated name for use in navigation, especially left hand navigations displayed on PLPs (Product Listing Pages).When a customer is looking through the list of categories in a navigational context, they often don’t need the full descriptive name to make sense of it. This is, in part, due to how parent and child categories are captured in the left hand nav. Using our example from above, If Large Vanilla Envelopes has siblings of Small Vanilla Envelopes and Medium Vanilla Envelopes, you wouldn't want to repeat "Vanilla Envelopes" over and over in the Left Hand Nav. This creates noise and doesn't add any value to the customer experience. Instead, you want to display what is different about these categories, "Small", "Medium", and "Large". These are the Navigation Names for their respective categories. Nav names are also what we use to power breadcrumbs, for the same purpose.
Page Title
Your Page Title is part of the core metadata of any Category and what is used to power Page Titles that are visible in the browser as a customer navigates to a PLP, as well as in the SERP for categories that have been indexed.
Meta Description
Like your Page Title, your Meta Description is another part of the core metadata of your category. A customer cannot see the meta description on your PLP but this is provided as metadata to bots as they crawl and can show up in the SERP for your categories. Search engines can and do choose other content from your page as part of the meta description. Read more about meta descriptions for your categories.
Slug
The Slug is part of the URL that identifies where your category can be access on your storefront. Merchstack Slug's can accept path-based URLs.
Assignment Method
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Manual | Allows a user to add or remove products manually. |
| Calculated | Uses rules to automatically manage product assignments. |
| Longtail | Calculated with additional features for inlinking tied to indexable facets. |
Category Visibility
| Type | Description |
|---|---|
| Public | Enables the category to be visible on the storefront. This is the default setting for new categories. |
| Private | Hides the category from the storefront, useful for maintenance or creating draft categories. A practical example is seasonal categories like 'Christmas', which you may not want visible year-round. |
Category Assets
Category assets allows you to upload assets in JPG, GIF, WEBP, AVIF, SVG or PNG form and set the category hero image. This sits at the top of the category page above the banner copy. You can upload multiple images individually and there are tickets out to allow you to chose which of these images acts as the hero image.