Imagine you run an online store with furniture. You have hundreds of cabinets, bookcases and shelves. Every product has its own parameters – height, width, door type, color and more. Ideally, you'd want the products to file themselves into the right categories:
- tall cabinets,
- medium bookcases without doors,
- low shelves,
- and a practically unlimited number of further categories that improve your SEO.
Sorting them by hand would take hours of work, and you'd still make mistakes easily. That's exactly what our parametric categories app solves.
How it works in practice
The basic principle is simple – you set up rules that decide how products move between categories.
- Source category – where the products come from, for example "Office cabinets".
- Target category – where they should end up, e.g. "Medium bookcases".
- Conditions – what decides whether a product belongs in the target category. Example: height between 100 and 150 cm and door type = "no doors".
The app then goes through all products every day and:
- removes anything from the target category that doesn't match the conditions,
- and adds every new product that does match them.
So you don't have to worry that a small shelf will be left among the "medium bookcases", or that a new bookcase won't be filed at all. Everything runs automatically and you just watch your online store grow.
What conditions you can set
The setup is flexible, so it handles more complex scenarios too. The options include, for example:
- Exact match – the parameter value is exactly "no doors".
- Partial match – the value contains the word "doors".
- Numeric condition – height > 100 cm, width ≤ 80 cm.
- Combination of several conditions – for example "(height ≥ 100 cm and height ≤ 150 cm) and (door type = no doors)".
The app also supports the logical operators "AND" and "OR", so you can build rules of any complexity.
Hierarchical categories: chaining rules
Another advantage is that rules can be stacked. For example, you can first create a general category "Tall cabinets" that collects every product over 150 cm.
Then you can attach another rule to that category: "Tall cabinets without doors".
The result is smart sorting that practically takes care of itself.
Summary of benefits
- Automation – categories update themselves, you set the rules just once.
- Accuracy – nothing extra in the categories and nothing missing.
- Time savings – no manual moving of products.
- Flexibility – you can combine conditions to fit your needs.
That way your online store always has a clear structure and customers easily find what they're looking for.
If you want more examples to picture it better, continue to the next article.