Product Categoriesallow you to organize your products and configurators to help users find what they're looking for. We offer two techniques: grouping by categories, and filtering by faceted search.
Overview
Categories are an optional way to organize your products and configurators. Start with the "All" category, and add more as you need them.
If you only have a few products, you may not need to use multiple categories. You may simply want to display everything on the Products page in one single list. This is the default functionality: Epicor CPQ has one special built-in category, named "All", which is visible to everyone. It lists all the configurators that this user has rights to see. It does not list all configurators. Begin offering your configurators in this one, simple list.
As you grow, you may want to break this one list of configurators into multiple categories. For example, create a category for each product line. Or a category for each geography, so your European customers won't be confused by seeing your configurators for the Asian markets. One configurator can be shown in multiple categories, for those products that should appear in multiple places.
Each category can be seen by some users, and hidden to others.
Categories also allow you to control access to products and configurators via user roles. This can be useful if you wish to categorize products and configurators based on their availability in different regions, or if you wish to only allow advanced sales reps access to complicated configurators. For example,
- if you don't want a group of users to see a configurator,
create a new category and adjust the "allowed roles" on that category so it's not visible to those users. Then place the configurator into the new category. Ensure it's not in any other categories these users can access. Now the configurator is now hidden from these users. Their "all" list (which shows them all the configurators they are allowed to see) honors your business logic, and will also hide these configurators. - if you want members of a channel to see only specific products,
create a category for those products and allow the channel role to only see that category.
Categories can appear in a flat list, or a hierarchical tree.
Categories can be set up in a tree structure where you can be more specific as you drill down. For example, if a transportation technology company has a pickup truck configurator, it could insert it into a "Trucks" category nested inside the categories of Vehicles > Ground > Passenger.
Add faceted search terms to any category, so your users can filter the category contents to see just what they need.
If you have a category of many items, add faceted search terms to help your users see only the items appropriate for them.
Displaying Items within Categories
In the admin interface, go to Settings > Settings > Display Products to control how items first appear within each category. Your user can override these settings as they browse.
- Display items in image mode. Each item will appear in a large tile, with a bigger item image.
- Display items in list mode. Each item will appear in a wide strip, with an image, description, and other useful text.
Managing Categories
The Products > Categories page in the administrative interface allows you to view, add, and delete categories.
- To create,
click the Add button at the bottom of the list. - To delete,
click on the line of the desired category without clicking its name to select it, then click Delete at the bottom of the list. - To edit,
click the name of the category in the list.
When you create or edit a category, the category details page appears. Edit the details and click "save" at the bottom of the screen, or use the other buttons to translate it into other languages, delete the category, or cancel your changes.
Category Properties
| Name | The displayed name for the category. |
| Parent Category | If you wish to nest this category within another category (such as "jet" nested within "aircraft") specify the parent category here. |
| Image | Provides a thumbnail image for the category, which will be shown next to its name in the catalog. |
| Description | A detailed description of the category. |
| Active | If unchecked, this category will not be visible in the end-user catalog, but will still be accessible through the admin portal. This is a useful technique to organize configurators you don't want your end users to see. |
| Inherit Permissions from Parent | If checked, this category will have the same permissions as its parent. Uncheck this box to set the permissions for this category individually in the following field. (If checked and the category has no parent, then access will be granted to all users.) |
| Allowed Roles | This is only visible if "Inherit Permissions from Parent" is unchecked. Specify which roles have access to this category. Leave blank to grant access to all users. |
| Attributes | A list of faceted search attributes added to this category. |
Adding Faceted Search to your Categories
If you've sorted your products into categories, but the list of items in those categories is still too long, try setting up faceted search. This technique, commonly found on direct-to-consumer shopping sites like Amazon and the like, helps your user filter the items shown in the category, based on useful concepts that are appropriate to the product.
For example, if you are selling heavy equipment, you might create three facets to make your products easier to find:
- a facet for type (rollers or compactors)
- a facet for power (less than 100kw, or more than that)
- a facet for compaction width (various amounts)
In the screenshot below, the user clicks "Search Tools" to reveal the search facets, and uses them to filter the "compactors" category to just the products needed.
Each facet you define will appear as a search filter across the top of the Products screen, so your user can easily find the 100kw Rollers, or the compactors with a wide width. One product can have multiple facet settings, such as a roller which has two power settings both above and below 100kw.
Facets can be various data types.
| Data type | Example facet |
|---|---|
| Text | Type of clothing (shirts, pants, accessories). |
| Boolean (true/false) | Waterproof (yes or no) |
| Number | Waist size (32, 34, 36, 38) |
| Date | Model Year (2019, 2020, 2021) |
Facets can be grouped.
You can group numeric ranges with handy labels (so instead of entering their pant size, your customer can select "medium" for sizes 7-10, and "large" for sizes 11 or greater). Or, if you track what material your cloting is made of, you can group your woolen, cotton, and linen products into "natural fabrics", with other fabrics grouped under "performance fabrics", and the like.
Facets honor your product group hierarchy.
Facets defined at a high-level group are automatically available to all products in any lower-level groups below it.
Setting up Categories and Facets, step-by-step
- Create your product categories.
- Optionally, assign any permissions to those categories.
- Optionally, drag your categories into a logical hierarchy.
- Finally, edit each product and configurator: in the "Categories" section of its properties, check the boxes to assign it to one or more category.
Most companies stop here, with categories. Continue to set up facets.
- Starting with the highest-level categories, define one or more search facets appropriate to that category.
- Edit the category.
- In the Attributes expander, click "New Attribute"
- Define your attribute:
- Give the attribute a name
- Specify the data type: text, number, boolean, or date
- Specify the control your user will interact with
- Show by default, if you want the facet to be visible immediately. If this facet is not a primary search criteria for most users, set this to false.
- Confine to a list, if you want to ensure the facet's parameters are consistent across all products.
- Use range buckets, if you want to group a range of numbers into a named bucket (such as having items with numerical sizes 32,34, and 36 appearing in a bucket called "Medium Size")
- Repeat for each attribute in that category.
Now that your facets are defined, they will be available in each Product and Configurator appearing in the category. Complete your work by using the facets you've defined.
-
Edit each product or configurator within that category.
In the "Categories" expander, confirm the categories where this product should appear.
-
in the "Attributes" expander, implement one or more attributes.
- Don't see the attribute you're looking for?
If the attribute you've defined in a product category is not appearing here, it's because this product/configurator is not in that category. Add it to that category first.
- See more attributes than you were expecting?
This product is organized into more than one category. You'll see all the attributes from all the categories the product belongs to listed here.
- Don't see the attribute you're looking for?
- Test your search, by opening up all the categories this product belongs to. Click the "search tools" button to see the facets appear. Ensure your product appears correctly.
Localizing Categories
To localize your category into different languages, follow these steps:
1. Setup the languages in the company settings
To add translations of a specific language, you must first have added this language to your company settings. Learn how
2. Open the translate dialog
In the category admin screen, click on the 'Translate' button in the bottom toolbar.
3. Add translations for your category properties
The translation dialog will show a list of all the properties that can be translated. There will be a column showing your terms for these items in your default language, and a column for each additional language you have chosen to support in your company settings.
Missing translations that need your attention are shown in red. To add missing translations, select the cell in the table and start typing. You can also auto-translate all the missing translations by clicking on the 'Auto-Translate' button, which will use the Google Translate API to fill in your missing translations.
4. Save your translations
To save your translations, click on 'OK', and then save the category. Note that if later you add more language to your company, you should also come back to the translations dialog and add the missing translations.