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About Catalog-Category Hierarchies

A product catalog is a collection of products arranged in a logical hierarchy of categories, according to your company's business needs.

Figure 1 shows a schematic of a catalog-category hierarchy with the catalog at the root level. The catalog is parent of three categories that are parents of more subcategories or products.

Figure 1. Product Catalog Hierarchy

You organize product catalogs by creating categories and structuring the categories and subcategories into parent-child relationships to form a catalog-category hierarchy. You then add products to categories. For example, the parent category, Beverages, can contain the Ace Splash Refrigerated Juice subcategory, which can contain all the Ace Splash brand refrigerated juice drink products. The Beverages category can also contain a subcategory for a different brand of beverages, Big Wave. When conducting a promotional campaign for a company's line of beverages, you can use the category or subcategory definition, such as Big Wave, to make sure that only those associated products are available for users to include in the trade promotion.

For sales volume planning (SVP) however, a category-subcategory hierarchy must be contiguous with only one designated SVP parent (root) category. For information about setting up category-product hierarchies for SVP, see Process of Setting Up Category-Product Hierarchies.