Miva Merchant 9.4 introduces a lot of new tools that allow you to manage the relationship between parent and child categories in your store. Because of all of these new features, this video revisits how you can go about setting up child categories also known as “subcategories” in your store. Usually working with categories you would need to be in your Catalog, which is found right here. In the menu, on the top left of your Admin, you'll also see the word Catalog in this list. Clicking on it will take you to the catalog area of your store. Notice that there is a triangle next to the word Catalog and clicking on the triangle does something a little different. It shows you actions that you can take that pertain to the Catalog area of your store. You can create a new category and you can create a new product. Notice also, you'll see a list of all of the top-level categories that you have in your store. Each of these categories in turn have their own triangle as well. Clicking on that triangle shows me another sub menu that are relative to the category I'm looking at. Here I can add a new subcategory or I can add a new product to this category. Bear in mind that we're talking about adding new subcategories and adding new products. Clicking on this “Add Product” link for instance will not allow me to add a product to the clothing category that already exists in the store. Let's go ahead and add a new subcategory by clicking on this link. We're going to create a “Shirts” category and I want to create another subcategory after this so I will click on “Add More.” I will create another category called “Pants.”
So now we have two sub categories under clothing. Let's have a look at clothing in particular. If we click on “More” and select “View on Live Store,” we can have a look at our work that we've done. Here we can see that shirts and pants are now listed as sub categories to clothing and we can also see see shirts and pants represented as subcategories on the left in the category tree. If we click away from the clothing category for instance, if we go into shoes, we can actually see that shirts and pants collapses and goes away and we won't see those subcategories unless we click back into the clothing category. Now let's go back into the admin. We're currently in the Edit Category page for the clothing category and you may notice that there is a tab here called Child Categories. Clicking into this tab shows us all of the current child categories for this clothing category. If I wanted to add a new child category for clothing, I can click this button here. I just have to give this new category a code and give it a name and click Add. Let me just click Refresh and you can see jackets are now a subcategory to our clothing category. Let's go back to the clothing category and it's Child Categories tab. You can also assign categories that already exist in your store to be child categories for this category. To be able to do that, you will need to click into the Show Records button and make sure that Show All or Show Unassigned is selected. Here I see dresses and I see sweaters are categories that I want under the clothing category. so I'll just select them like so and when I go back to the store and hit Refresh those categories are now sub categories to clothing as well.
So far we've been approaching this from the angle of adding Child Categories under Parent Categories. There is a reverse approach where you can define Parent Categories to a Child Category and I can show you that now. For this I'm going to click into the Catalog and select the Categories tab and here we have a whole list of all of the categories in my store. Here I see Boots and Slippers and these are two categories that can be subcategories to my Shoes category. So I wanted to declare that in this Parent Category column. If you don't see this Parent Category column, you can bring it up by clicking this Show/Hide Columns button and making sure that Parent Category is checked off like so. Let's go ahead and select Boots and Slippers and click this “Edit” button and here we want to type in the code for the category we want as the Parent Category. If you know the code you can just type it in, but if you need to look it up you can click this button here and you just select the one you're looking for and then click “Okay.” When you're done making all of your edits, go ahead and click the “Save” button and Boots and Slippers are now sub categories to Shoes. Finally, if I go to the Edit Category Page for Sneakers you will see that there is a field here called Parent Category. Again, I can type in the code to the category I want as the Parent Category, but if I don't know the code I can click on this look up button and select the category I'm looking for and then click “Okay.” When I've made that change, I just click the “Update” button to save my work and now the Sneakers category is also a subcategory to my Shoes category. If I go back to my store,I can click on the Shoes category to see my work. And that's how you manage Parent and Child Categories in Miva Merchant 9.