Category Schema

Your category schema is how you organize your inventory to make it easy for customers to browse on your Propcart Pro Webstore.

It consists of three levels or layers of groupings: Departments, Categories, and Subcategories.

Until you define your own, your Dashboard and webstore use Propcart's default category schema.

Here's Pinacoteca's Propcart Pro category schema as an example:

Notice the six Departments at the top: Cleared Art, Furniture, Lighting, Linens, Rugs and Smalls. (The "All" and "New" links are not departments).

Hovering over the "Cleared Art" department you can see the seven categories in bold and uppercase and the subcategories in title case. Notice how easy it is to scan to find what you're looking for and get a sense of what kind of artwork is available.

Best Practices

Ideally, your category schema would organize your inventory into 5 to 9 Departments. Each Department would have 5 to 9 Categories, and each Category would have 5 to 9 Subcategories.

In practice, this is difficult to achieve. But if you can, it provides a user-friendly browsing experience for your customers, who don't have the time, patience or willpower to read through hundreds of keywords in your schema.

• Embrace Miller's Law and list 5 - 9 options at each level.
• Prefer nouns over adjectives.
• Use title case (capitalize the first character of each major word, e.g. "Dining Chairs" not "dining chairs").
• Use the plural not singular form of the noun (e.g. "Couches" not "Couch").
• Use the ampersand "&" instead of the word "and".

Naming Rules

• Each name can be up to 36 characters long.
• Only letters, numbers, spaces and these characters are allowed: & ' + , -
• Department names must be unique. Category names must be unique within their department, and subcategory names must be unique within their category.
• The same name can appear in more than one place, e.g. a "Chairs" subcategory under both Furniture > Seating and Office > Furniture. See Why This Matters below for how this works on your website.

How It Works

Your category schema is a tree made of nodes (Department → Category → Subcategory). Each node represents a spot on your website where items can be browsed. When a customer clicks a node, they see all items that belong to it.

However, your Dashboard and your public website handle this differently, so it’s helpful to understand what’s going on behind the scenes.

How Categories Work in the Dashboard (Hierarchy Method)

In the Dashboard, each item has:

• One Department
• One Category
• One Subcategory

Take, for example, a green, midcentury modern chair:

Field	Value
Department	Furniture
Category	Seating
Subcategory	Chairs
Tags	Furniture, Seating, Chairs, Green, Midcentury Modern

In the Dashboard, filtering looks like this:

Select items where Department = Furniture AND Category = Seating AND Subcategory = Chairs

This returns all items that are stored in that exact hierarchy.

Many prop houses physically organize their warehouse by this same schema. Storage locations, GL codes, and even pricing strategies may follow the category structure. Inventory audits are often performed by walking through department and category aisles. If items don’t have storage locations, sorting an order's line items by category schema can also make it faster to pull and restock items that live together.

When you pick an item's Department, Category and Subcategory on its More tab, Propcart adds those names to the item's tags for you. If you later change them, the new names are added but the old ones stay in the tags. Remove the old tags if you no longer want the item to show up under its old node on your website.

How Categories Work on Your Website (No Hierarchy / Tag Method)

Your website does not use the department → category → subcategory hierarchy. It only uses tags.

So when a shopper clicks:

Furniture > Seating > Chairs

The website actually runs this search:

Select items where Tags contains Furniture AND Seating AND Chairs

The order of tags does not matter. Any item with all three of those tags will appear.

This means you can refine results even more, simply by adding more tags:

Select items where Tags contains Furniture AND Seating AND Chairs AND Green AND Midcentury Modern

Why This Matters: Items Can Appear in More Than One Node

Because search is based on tags, an item can belong to multiple nodes with no duplication or re‐categorizing required.

Example: The same chair could also work in an office setting.

Your category schema might include:

Office > Furniture > Chairs

To make the chair show up in that node too, just add the Office tag.

Now the item's tags are:

Field	Value
Tags	Furniture, Seating, Chairs, Green, Midcentury Modern, Office

Now it will appear under both nodes:

• Furniture > Seating > Chairs
• Office > Furniture > Chairs

This increases discoverability and avoids the stress of “which category should I choose?” Often, the answer can simply be both.

Tag Limits

• Each item can have up to 30 tags
• Each tag can be up to 36 characters long

Key Takeaway

• Dashboard = strict hierarchy (one department → one category → one subcategory)
• Website = flexible tags (items can appear under multiple nodes if they contain those tags)

Your Dashboard organizes your warehouse and bookkeeping.
Your Website helps customers find items quickly.

The "New" Department

Adding a department named "New" shows items created within the last few weeks, instead of items tagged "New". Set the number of weeks with the "New" Week Count in your Webstore Settings. The default is 3. The same setting controls the "New" badge on item cards. Setting it to 0 turns off the badge and leaves the "New" department empty, so remove the department too.

You can also add "New" as a category under a department. For example, Furniture > New shows furniture created within the last few weeks.

Hiding a Department, Category or Subcategory

To keep a department, category or subcategory in your Dashboard but leave it off your Propcart Pro Webstore and your Propcart Marketplace storefront, edit it and turn on Hide on Webstore?. Hiding a department or category also hides everything beneath it. As with any other schema change, publish your webstore for this to take effect.

This only removes the node from your webstore's menus and category lists. Items under it can still show up in search results and under other nodes they're tagged for. To keep the items themselves off your webstore, change their visibility.

Choosing Between Synonyms

Sofas and couches are synonyms; they refer to the same thing. So when defining your category schema, which word do you use?

The practical response (as opposed to your personal preference) is to choose the term that customers are going to search for more often. So how do you know which term this is?

Use Google Trends to see which search term is more popular:

Here you can compare how often "couch" and "sofa" are searched on Google.

Note that "couch" (the red line) is the more popular search term, so that's probably the term you should use for your category schema.

However, rather than adding both the "sofa" and "couch" keywords to every item that is a couch, we can save ourselves this work by adding "synonyms" to the search engine instead.

Editing Your Category Schema

Edit your category schema in your Category Schema Settings. Every change saves as soon as you make it.

• Add: click Add department. To add a category or subcategory, click a department or category to expand it, then click Add category or Add subcategory.
• Rename: click the pencil icon. See Renaming below.
• Reorder: drag a row up or down. The order here is the order of your webstore's menus. You can also drag a category into another department, or a subcategory into another category in the same department.
• Delete: click the trash icon. Deleting a department or category also deletes everything beneath it. There's no undo.
• Search: click the magnifying glass icon to see every item tagged with that name in Inventory > Items. This searches by tag only, so a subcategory such as "Chairs" also finds chairs tagged under other departments.
• Download: click Download CSV or Download JSON to save a copy of your category schema.

Renaming

After you rename a department, category or subcategory, Propcart asks whether to update your inventory too. Click Update Items to move every item in the old node to the new name, and to replace the old name in the items' tags with the new one. Click No to change the schema only.

If you rename a subcategory to the name of another subcategory in the same category, Propcart offers to delete the old subcategory and then move its items into the existing one.

Moving and Deleting Leaves Items Alone

Dragging a node somewhere else or deleting it doesn't change any items. Items keep their old department, category, subcategory and tags. To find and reassign them, use the Download Items Not in Category Schema report, or update them in bulk with a spreadsheet.

Publishing Your Changes

Changes take effect right away on your Dashboard. Your Propcart Marketplace storefront picks them up the next time Propcart updates the Marketplace.

For Propcart Pro customers, you'll have to redeploy your Propcart Pro Webstore for the changes to take effect on it. This is because we pre-build your webstore before serving/hosting it so that each webpage loads extra fast.

To redeploy your Propcart Pro Webstore, go to your Settings > Webstore tab.

and click the blue Publish button.

Enforcing Your Category Schema

By default, you can type any department, category or subcategory on an item, even one that isn't in your category schema. To stop typos and one-off names from creeping in, go to your Inventory Settings, turn on Enforce Category Schema? under Tag Settings and click Save.

With this on:

• Saving an item's More tab fails if its department isn't in your category schema, its category isn't in that department, or its subcategory isn't in that category.
• Bulk imports reject any department, category or subcategory name that isn't in your category schema. Imports check each name on its own, not whether the category belongs to the department.

Default Department

To have new items start in a particular department, choose a Default Department in your Inventory Settings. It's also selected for you when you open Inventory > Items.

GL Codes

Propcart can generate your GL codes from your category schema, so each department, category and subcategory gets its own code. Contact Propcart support to turn this on.

Once it's on, each department, category and subcategory has a GL Code field when you edit it, and each item gets the GL code of the most specific node it's assigned to. Your GL Code Settings then list these codes as read-only.

Find Missing Departments, Categories & Subcategories

To filter for missing departments, select the "Missing" option at the bottom of the Department filter dropdown menu.

To filter for missing categories, first select a department, then select category = Missing.

To filter for missing subcategories, first select a department and category, then select subcategory = Missing.

To find items whose department, category or subcategory is set but no longer in your category schema, for example after you delete one, download the Items Not in Category Schema report. The Category Schema Counts report shows how many items are in each node, which helps you spot empty pages before you publish.

Find Missing Titles

You can filter for items missing Titles by selecting the + Add Filter filter button on the Inventory > Items filter bar.

Then type in "missing" to the search box and select the starts with "missing" option.

You should end up with this missing titles query.