Facet inheritance settings control how a catalog or category inherits facets from a parent.

For example, the following illustration shows a catalog hierarchy that contains a root catalog called Master Catalog and its subcatalog, Womens Clothing. The Master Catalog contains a catalog facet, master_catalog_facet. The Womens Clothing catalog also contains a catalog facet, womens_clothing_facet.

If the property that is used in defining a facet in the “parent/ancestor” catalog is not available in the “child” catalog that facet will not be available when browsing the categories of the child catalog. Referring back to the example above, if master_catalog_facet used faceting property “style” and that property was not defined for the products and SKUs in Womens Catalog, then when browsing to Dresses the user will not see master_catalog_facet.

If a facet is blocked from a category or catalog, it is automatically blocked from all of its subcategories and subcatalogs.

A subcatalog can inherit catalog facets from parent catalogs, regardless of whether the parents are associated with your user profile.

Note: This behavior does not apply to Category facets. A subcatalog does not inherit category facets from categories in a parent catalog if the parent is not in the user’s profile.

For example, the following illustration shows a catalog hierarchy that contains a root catalog called Master Catalog and its subcatalog, Womens Clothing. The Master Catalog contains a catalog facet, master_catalog_facet. The Womens Clothing catalog also contains a catalog facet, womens_catalog_facet.

The Womens Catalog is associated with a merchandiser’s profile, but the Master Catalog is not. The merchandiser navigates to the Dresses category and selects Inherit facets from parent categories. The womens_catalog_facet appears in the list of inherited facets.

If you are unsure about which catalogs are associated with your user profile, ask your administrator.