Starting this post as place to gather all our thoughts about product categories. Since we started the shop uplift, there have been a number of slack posts on this issue, in different channels, and it is getting hard to follow the discusussions. In addition there have been issues created for some of these ideas, but not all - so right now, github doesn’t have a complete summary of our thoughts either.
If there is a better way to structure this - I’m very happy for your changes… We’ve know for some time that our taxonomy model needs some work.
These are the category/taxon issues that have arisen recently as we’ve been moving through the shop uplift process.
1. Categories cannot be deleted or modified once a product is associated.
Is there a wishlist item to make it possible for super admin to change categories? We would need some kind of soft-delete for the ‘old’ category attached to products? Maybe if we had some of the issues below, we wouldn’t need this.
The problem at present, is category lists continue to expand. Example - we had a hub that needed category X and they made a strong case for it. They were a large hub so super admin added the category for them. Two years later, the hub leaves the platform. No other user needs 'Category x" but it remains because we cannot remove it. This happens repeatedly and the product list keeps growing.
- Categories are not translatable.
For bilingual or trilingual instances, categories need to be either (a) translated in the category name. But this results in very long category names displaying in the shopfront (undesireable). Or super admin can (b) duplicate the same category in multiple languages. This is what we do on OFN-Canada. Categories were initally created in english. As our franophone users request, we duplicate categories in french. So the seller selects the categories in the language of their choice and they show in that language in the shop. An old issue about this is (Here
This ‘solution’ has several problems:
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The list of categories/taxons keeps getting longer. If all the categories are not translated upon creation, then users have to scroll through many categories not in their language to select what they are looking for…and then ask for their creation…
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What happens when a supplier (profile enterprise) supplies 2 hubs - one is selling in english, and the second is selling in french. (We already have several of these examples on OFN-Canada). Does this profile user choose their category in french or english? (Maybe this will be solved when we have sourced variants. ie - a hub selling in French, will create a sourced variant from an english speaking supplier, and translate the source variant and select the french category?)
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Difficulty navigating long lists of categories for users (when creating/editing products)
Users complain about navigating long lists of categories - both when creating/filtering products on the bulk edit products page AND in the ‘display ordering in shopfront’ setting. Possible solutions have been suggested:
a. There is an issue here to make the presentation of category lists alphabetical in both places (and its a good first issue - so hoping it can get picked up)
b. Enterprises can ‘customize’ their own category list from a longer ‘mother’ list presented to them. So, every ‘sells own’ and ‘sells any’ enterprise selects the categories they need from a longer list presented ot them. So the number of categories created by super admin doesn’t really matter. Its a ‘mother’ list, and each user will select from it. (maybe this larger ‘mother’ list is the DFC list? See below) -
Use DFC Categories
@maikel has noted that in light of DFC work, we were planning to map all categories to DFC categories and eventually offer that list. But given the DFC list doesn’t have all the categories OFN instances need, we would either need to expand the DFC category list, OR maintain the ability to support OFN custom categories. (Slack thread here)
This thread has some other interesting ideas such as using the DFC categories at the root level, and then allowing creation of detailed categories under that.
An issue related to this exists here.
Here is the current list of DFC categories.
I am not sure how the DFC categories handle multiple languages?
And it seems (same thread linked above) that the cost of continually adding to DFC categories isn’t clear at this point. But it would, presumably be an ongoing budget issue.
Here is the link to the read me about contributing to DFC categories (I think)
- Allowing a product to have multiple categories has also been raised as an issue. Here.
I am concluding with 2 observations, from a support perspective, (that perhaps conflict with a development perspective):
1.Categories are REALLY important to users. They see the category as a critical extension of THEIR product. They don’t like the idea that they must ‘conform’ with OFN-supplied information. They feel they have less control over their listing when they can’t find the category they think they need.
2. Users change their product mix constantly to ‘keep up’ with changing customer needs and trends. So, they want to create new categories all the time. So while OFN sees the category list as a somewhat stagnant list that doesn’t change much, our users see the need for categories to change constantly.
IMHO
