Categories, brands, filters and products

On ShopWired, a product is an individual item that is for sale. A product can be:

• A physical item that you deliver to your customer (or they pick up from you)
• Including rental and subscription items
• A digital item that you deliver to your customer (e.g. by providing them with a download link)
• ShopWired has a digital downloads app you can use to sell digital products
• A service that you provide to your customer
• Including subscription services

Products can have various options or customisations available to visitors when they add them to their basket. Options and customisations include:

• Variations, such as different sizes or colours
• Choices, such as add-ons or optional extras
• Extras
• Customisation options, such as adding custom text or images

ShopWired integrates with three separate services that can help you to source products to sell on your website:

• Printful, a print-on-demand provider
• Printify, another print-on-demand provider
• Avasam, a UK-based drop-shipping platform

If your website only sells a small number of the same type of products, it will be easy for your visitors to navigate and find the products that they want to buy. If your website sells a larger number of products, you should organise your website so that different types of products are contained in different sections of your website, making it easier to navigate.

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On ShopWired, a category is an organisational method used to group similar products together so that they appear in the same place on your website. Categories can also be used to organise similar categories together and create a "parent category" and "subcategory" structure, e.g.

Sportswear → Fitness Tops → Ladies Fitness Tops → Vest Tops

In the example above, Sportswear is a parent category of Fitness Tops, which is a subcategory. Fitness Tops is itself a parent category too, of Ladies Fitness Tops (which is also a subcategory).

By utilising the categories feature on ShopWired, you can create different levels of categories. This feature is particularly useful if you are selling a wide variety of different types of products.

Some important notes about categories:

• A product can be assigned to multiple, different categories
• A category can be assigned to multiple, different parent categories
• A category can either contain products or subcategories, but not both

Read more about categories.

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On ShopWired, a brand is another organisational method used to group similar products. Brands are mainly used to identify the manufacturer of the product, but the feature can be repurposed to suit the needs of your business.

Some important notes about brands:

• A product can only be assigned to a single brand
• If you are integrating your ShopWired account and website with a service like Google Shopping you'll need to assign each of your products to a brand
• Unlike categories, brands can only be 'one level' - there's no concept of "parent brands" and "sub-brands"

Read more about brands.

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ShopWired's filters feature can be used in conjunction with both the brands and categories feature to help visitors sort through the products they are viewing on a particular category or brand page. Filters can also appear on your website's search results page.

For each product that you create, you can assign the applicable filters. For example, if you are selling a number of t-shirts on your website, you might like visitors to be able to filter out the t-shirts they don't want to view (such as by size availability, colour, price or style).

Filters are grouped together into filter groups. To use the filters feature on ShopWired you'll need to:

• Install the filters app
• Create filter groups (such as colour or style)
• Assign applicable filters to each product for each filter group

Read more about filters and filter groups.

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