Plan your catalog before you add products

Ten minutes of planning saves hours of renaming later. This lesson covers the decisions to make before you open the product form.

Categories#

Categories are how customers browse and how search engines understand your range. A few rules that work for most stores:

• Keep the tree shallow. Two levels is enough for most catalogs, for example "Shoes" and then "Boots".
• Name categories the way customers search, not the way your supplier labels them.
• A product can belong to more than one category. Use this instead of duplicating products.

Kambloo keeps product URLs flat. A product lives at /urun/product-name, not under its category. This means a product can sit in several categories without duplicate pages, and moving it between categories never breaks a link. The category path still appears in breadcrumbs and in structured data, so search engines see the context.

Each category gets its own page with filters. Filters come from product attributes and variant options, so a well-planned attribute set makes category pages more useful.

Brands#

If you sell more than one brand, create them as brands rather than as categories. Each brand gets a page and a filter on category pages. If you sell only your own products, create one brand with your store name. It appears in structured data and in product feeds, which shopping channels expect.

Product types#

Every product has one of three types:

• Simple. One version, one price, one stock count. Most consumables and single-size items.
• Variant. Several versions that differ by options such as color and size. Each version has its own stock, SKU and, if you want, price and image. Lesson 3 covers this in detail.
• Digital. A downloadable file or license key delivered by a time-limited link.

Decide the type before you create the product. You can still add variants to a product later, but it is cleaner to know up front.

Tax classes#

Every product needs a tax class. VAT rates differ by product group in Turkey. Create one tax class per rate you use, then assign each product. Invoices and checkout totals read the VAT rate from this class.

Product status#

A product starts as a draft. Drafts are invisible on the storefront and are not in the sitemap. When the product is complete, set it to active. Archived products stay in your records and in past orders, but customers cannot buy them.

Working in drafts lets you prepare a whole collection and publish it at once.

Names, slugs and languages#

The product name becomes the URL slug automatically. Turkish characters are converted, so ç becomes c and ğ becomes g. If you later change a slug, Kambloo creates a permanent redirect from the old address, so shared links keep working.

If you plan to sell in more than one language, note that the slug stays the same in every language. Only the name, description and other text are translated. Module 6 returns to this.

Attributes#

Attributes are the facts about a product that customers compare: material, sole, origin, weight, care. Kambloo lets each category carry an attribute template, so every product in "Shoes" asks for the same fields. Filling these in produces the specification table on the product page, the same data in structured data, and the same data in product feeds. Plan the template per category now and you will not have to revisit hundreds of products later.

Importing many products#

If you already have a product list, you do not have to type it in. Kambloo accepts Excel and CSV imports using a template, including bulk image upload by URL column or zip file. The import runs in the background and gives you an error report. Plan your categories and attributes before the import, so the file maps cleanly.

Common mistakes#

• Deep category trees that customers have to click through.
• Creating a category per brand instead of using brands.
• Skipping tax classes and discovering the wrong VAT on the first invoice.
• Renaming products repeatedly after launch. The redirects work, but a stable URL is better for search.

Apply this in your store: create your categories, brands and tax classes now, so the product form in the next lesson has everything it needs.