In this section:
- The difference between Category Properties and Variants
- Creating a Property
- Editing Values
- Assigning Properties to products
- Merge Values
In this article we will take a look at the category properties, how to create and manage them. Using these properties customers are able to filter products from different categories according to common criteria.
The difference between Category Properties and Variants
- Variants: They determine whether the concrete product has different variants, such as /Color, Size, etc./. If they exist on a product it is mandatory for the customer to choose which Variant they want. Here you can find out more about them.
- Properties: Fundamentally, they differ from the Variants by being assigned to a category instead of the products themselves. Unlike the Variants, the Category Property is not mandatory. They characterize the product and are visualized in the product catalog.
Creating a Property
1. Go into your control panel, from the menu choose Products > Category Property > Add new property
2. In the opened window, fill in the blanks:
- Choose the name of the Property accordingly
- Choose between the different available option types - checkbox or range
- URL address will be created automatically when you write the property's name
- Add the desired image in the Category Property Image section. This image will help customers visually distinguish the properties
- Add property values. For example, for property "savor", the value could be "blackberry". You can add as many values as you wish. These are the values by which the products will be filtered.
3. After you have added the property, from the categories button you can choose which categories it should be assigned to.
The category property need to be added to the main category as well as to the subcategories (if any) of the products to which you want to assign the created property. You can then easily add the desired property from the product edit page. If the category property you are creating is added only to the main category, without defining the subcategories, it will not be possible to assign it to the products that belong to the corresponding subcategory.
4. Once the category property is created, the values can be edited through the button "Edit property values".
Within you would see each assigned value to the property and personalize it for convenience. Example:
Assigning Properties to products
When you are all done with creating the Category Properties, go to the products that you want to have a property from that particular Category.
1. Go to a product and click on Set category specific properties.
2. Sorting values - after entering the values, click on "Enable drag & drop sorting" so that you can drag and drop to adjust the order of the category properties.
4. Automatic sorting - if all property values are numbers, you can enable automatic sorting.
3. Choose the values you want and don't forget to publish your changes:
- Here's what the added Wine Category Property would look like:
Here you can see that after we have chosen to filter by one of the property values, several types of wine have appeared in the results. These are the wines that have this value (blackberry) assigned. In this case, the values are presented with small photos.
Merge Values
On the page with the property values, you can merge different values to 1 selected value, as everywhere they will be overwritten with the selected one and the old ones will be deleted. This functionality is especially useful in case you use different imports, and new properties and values are added with each import.
Or if you are migrating your store from another platform to CloudCart and have values that are written differently, you can easily merge them with this functionality.
To merge values of the selected property, click on the Edit Property values button:
Then click the Merge Values button in the upper right corner of the screen and select the value to which you want to merge the selected values of the property. As well as which values you want to be merged to the selected value in the field above. After merging, the selected values will be replaced with the one you have selected.
You can find more information on how to manage your products in our Help Center.