There are several organizational models you can use for your product catalog in Oracle ATG Web Commerce. For example, you arrange your items in a simple tree-like structure. In this model, each category contains products or other categories as its children, and each category or product has one parent category, as shown by the following diagram.

Note that there is a single navigational path to any given product. For example, to get to the BMX Racing Helmet product, the customer must select Accessories, then Helmets, and then BMX Racing Helmet.

Alternatively, you can offer your customers multiple navigation paths to reach a given product. The following diagram illustrates a product catalog in which products have multiple parent categories.

As a third option, you can present entirely different catalogs to different users.

When users with access to the Bike Store catalog view the root categories, they see all of the root categories in the Accessories subcatalog as well as the root categories of the Bike Store catalog itself. A user who only has access to the Accessories catalog, however, sees only the Helmets and Lights root categories.