Overview

Planning Your Categories

Tips for Creating Categories

Category Worksheet

Adding Ecommerce Categories

Images

Descriptions

Working with the Category Screen in NRO

General Information tab

Display Settings tab

Custom Design tab

Overview

It’s time to plan your store navigation and add categories.

We recommend that you start with a small group of your best-selling items, and then continue to add more items later. The sooner your store is up and running, the sooner you can begin generating sales!

Planning Your Categories

The structure and names of the ecommerce categories that you create now will actually form the navigation of your NRO store. Although these ecommerce categories come directly from Counterpoint, please note that they are not the same as your inventory categories in Counterpoint!

Similar to the organization of a physical store, the structural goal for your online store is to make it easy for your customers to find and purchase items. Your customers already think of your merchandise in terms of departments, sections, vendors, etc., or in ways that your physical stores are arranged.

You can define an unlimited number of ecommerce categories and subcategories—up to eight levels deep. And you can list a single item in as many categories as you want.

TIP: The fewer clicks it takes to get to your merchandise, the better! In other words, the fewer category levels of merchandise in your online store, the quicker your customers can get to the items they want to buy. We recommend no more than two or three category levels!

Online sales frequently fail because shoppers cannot find the products that they want to buy. It’s important to have a well-planned category structure:

• Think about departments in your store. Create category names that are meaningful to shoppers.
• Use natural language in category names. Incorporate your target keywords into your category names. Resist using all UPPER CASE letters and symbols such as &.
• To facilitate organic search engine optimization (SEO), name your product categories and sub-categories using high-volume, multi-keyword search phrases. Similarly, be sure to include all your best categories as top-level categories. Because top-level categories display on every page on your site, search engines are more likely to find them. Learn more about SEO and keywords in Ecommerce Success: Tips & Techniques
• Add items to multiple categories to give shoppers multiple ways to find items in your store, for example:

It’s a good idea to plan your category structure on paper. You can use up to eight levels, but we recommend no more than three levels. Complete a similar worksheet for each Category level 1 .

Adding Ecommerce Categories

Counterpoint: Setup / Ecommerce / Categories

In NCR Counterpoint, select Setup / Ecommerce / Categories and use the drag-and-drop category editor to add additional ecommerce categories and subcategories. You can also change category names, delete categories, assign images and descriptions to each category, and add items to each category.

NOTE: The ecommerce categories defined here are not directly related to your Counterpoint item categories.

Learn more about adding items to each ecommerce category in the Ecommerce Items .

TIP: To print a list of all the categories defined so far, select Setup / Ecommerce / Reports / Categories . You can also print any items that have not been assigned to any ecommerce categories.

You can display an item in an unlimited number of categories. To change the category sort orders for NRO you can move the categories up or down in Counterpoint.

Images

Counterpoint: Setup / Ecommerce / Categories

For each category and sub-category, optionally assign an image that will display when customers browse your store.

TIP: Ask your vendors to provide you with professional, web-optimized category images.

You can assign category images to all, none, or some of the category levels you define for your online store. If you don’t assign images to a category level, the category name will be used instead.

We recommend that you use a naming convention for your category image files that will help you identify and manage the images. A useful naming convention assists you in recognizing images and facilitates image changes.

Image filenames should not contain spaces or special characters such as asterisks (*).

Descriptions

Counterpoint: Setup / Ecommerce / Categories

Use category descriptions to identify the items included in the category or to provide shoppers with general information about the category.

TIP: Include SEO target keywords and phrases in your category descriptions to facilitate organic search engine optimization. Category descriptions should be both descriptive and informative, and should include keywords and phrases similar to those used in your category meta information.

Formatting Long Descriptions

Long descriptions may include HTML formatting. The maximum length of each category description is 6,320 characters.

Working with Category Screen in NRO

TIP: Include SEO target keywords and phrases in your meta information to facilitate organic search engine optimization.

Display Settings tab

TIP: Not all static blocks may be available for display on your category pages. This can depend on your settings inside the category as well as where the CMS block is set to display.

Custom Design tab

The Custom Design tab allows you to make appearance changes to a specific category or subcategory. You can specify whether the category should always reflect the custom design or indicate a date for the custom design to revert back to the non-customized design. This is a nice setting for the holidays!

The NCR Counterpoint Information tab displays the category number assigned to the category by Counterpoint.

Category Products tab

This tab displays the items that are currently assigned to the selected category.

WARNING : Changes made here will be overwritten by the next Counterpoint publish.