Set up Categories
Store Planning
It is best to have a clear plan of your store organisation and hierarchy of categories and products before starting.
Give thought to the naming from the perspective of your customers and what they will be searching for so they will find navigation and therefore find your products easily. It is worth noting that it is difficult for customers to scan long lists and will also notice the first and last items most. Therefore, limit the number of top level categories as much as possible. Ideally a maximum of 7 works well. This also applies to the sub-categories of each category.
Categories can contain sub-categories or products but not both (although advanced users can make Phoenix do anything).
Sub-categories can have more sub-categories and so on to create a category tree.
You will also need pictures for your categories and products optimised for viewing on the internet - this means they need to have a small file size so they do not take up too much memory or take too long to load whilst still being of a quality good enough for viewing. See - GIMP
Sample Categories
From admin go to 
Catalog → Categories/Products
If you chose to include sample products when you installed CE Phoenix you will see this.
The sample products and categories can be deleted - click the folder icon for the category to show the products it contains.
- Click on a product in the list.
- Click Delete
- Repeat for each product.
- Click Back
- Click on the category in the list.
- Click Delete
- Repeat until all products and categories have been deleted.
Set Categories
Click New Category - you will see this:
- Category Name
- Enter the name.
- Category Title for SEO
- Leave blank or enter something different to the category name if required.
- Category Description
- Enter a description to show on the category page. Text can be styled how you wish by using HTML markup. At its simplest, to create a paragraph with a line break, enclose your text with <p> </p> e.g. <p>your text.</p> or to create a line break type <br> e.g. your text.<br>
Read more about HTML here - Simple HTML to Format Text
- Category Meta Description for SEO
- Think of this as a short description of less than 30 words.
- Category Image
- Click Browse to choose and upload an image from your computer.
- Sort Order
- Enter a sort order value to order your categories.
- Click Save
Read more about Search Engine Optimisation here - Search Engine Optimisation
Many Addons and Extensions available in the CE Phoenix Cart Addons Library
If help is needed, support is available in the CE Phoenix Cart Support Forum
Phoenix Cart User Guide, like CE Phoenix Cart, is free to use but is maintained by unpaid volunteers.
All other content is the reserved Intellectual Property and Copyright of phoenixcart.org
