Categories

Categories are used for grouping and classifying products and ingredients in Solteq Commerce Cloud. All products and ingredients belong to a least one category, and can also belong to several categories at once. In addition, every category itself belongs to a category type. 

The category structure in Solteq Commerce Cloud is both hierarchical and cross-cutting, meaning that it is possible to both create categories using the classic tree structure, as well as connect categories freely with each other. In addition, it is possible to create sub-categories, and use categories to create brands, attributes, and variants.

Categories also enable you to add search terms, brands or supplier information for products and ingredients, for instance.

You can define maximum discount percentages for categories; this way you can prevent any discounts to be applied to products in certain categories (such as alcohol products), or define that no more than a 50% discount is ever applied to certain products, for instance.

Category Types

Category type is an umbrella term for categories. You can create categories under a category type. For example, Drinks can be a category type and Sodas would then be a category under it.

As a default, Solteq Commerce Cloud always contains one existing category type which cannot be removed, and which is mandatory for all products.

Ingredients must always belong to at least one category type, which can also be other than the default category type.

Category Options

You can define the following options for a category:

• Max discount: Maximum discount for the products in the category.

  • See Maximum Discount Rules for information on how the maximum discount limit is applied in a POS.

• Selling restrictions: This setting is used for age-restricted products such as alcohol or tobacco products. If you select this checkbox, the products in the category cannot be bought by customers in Self-Service checkout mode in Kiosk.

Classic Tree Structure

In case you want to build a product hierarchy comprising of three levels, where products are designated with a Product Group, a Main Group and a Product Line, the recommended way of doing this is the following:

1. Name the default category type (group) as Product Group.

2. Create two new category types: maingroup and productline. After these have been created, you can rename them properly (Main Group and Product Line).

3. Product Group will contain all the values from the levels of hierarchy under it.

If a product belongs to the Product Line category type, this does not automatically mean that the product belongs to a certain Main Group. In addition, belonging to the Main Group does not indicate that the product belongs to a certain Product Group; you need to create the product hierarchy according to the specific demands of your organization.

When you create product categories manually in the Back Office, the system automatically generates the category ID inside the category type, starting from value 1.

To create your own ID scheme, use the Excel import feature; after the import, you can rename the categories as you wish in the Back Office.

The attachment below contains an example product hierarchy.

Product_hierarchy.xlsx

The following table depicts the product hierarchy in the Excel file.

In addition to the hierarchies depicted above, Solteq Commerce Cloud also supports cross-cutting categories; examples of these include Brand and Supplier, or designated category types corresponding to different accounting rules.