Subcategory question

[MarkoSiroki]

Dear Sirs and Madams!

I am newbie at zen cart so I politly ask for little patience. I have following situation: Our webshop sells vehicle oils and other automotive parts and we have several main categories, one of them is named Vehicle Maintenance. In this group, there are following subgroups:
- Oils
- Filters
- Motor Belts
- Spark Plugs
That is ok, I've setup main category and these subcategories. Now, for every of these subcategories we want to have some entities, for instance, for oils, we want to present Oils for Motorbikes, for Automobiles and for Nautics. For filters subgroup, we want to present Filters for Nautics and Automobiles. Where do I setup Subgroup "properties", so I can choose for every subgroup which segment will cover (Motorbikes, Automobiles, Nautices - combinations of these three)?

Sincerely,
Marko

[dbltoe]

A general rule of thumb is that the customer will leave if not to a product by the third click. You currently have something like:

1. Vehicle Maintenance
   
   • Oils
     
     • Motorbikes
       
       • Harley-Davidson
         
       • Honda
         
         
         • Pennzoil
           
         • Castrol
           
           
           • 10w30
           
           
         • Quaker State
         
         
       • Yamaha
       
       
     • Autos
       
       • Chevy
         
       • Ford
         
       • Dodge

So to get to the oils for Honda, the customer clicks VM, Oils, Motorbikes, Honda before getting to any oil. With the other categories under Honda for Oil brands (Pennzoil, Castrol, Quaker State) we're now talking five clicks to get to Castrol 10w30!

Seems to me that you can eliminate the Vehicle Maintenance and Oils categories and just have Motorbike Oils, Automotive Oils, and Marine Oils as top categories. With Motorbike Oils as the top, you'd click the second time on something like Honda, then third on Castrol to see the 10w30 you want. Three clicks and I'm seeing the products.

The big thing to remember about the layout above is that a category cannot have both subcategories and products. So the items above in red cannot have any products.

The items above in green would contain products and no subcategories.

Also, using the listing above, a customer would need to make two clicks before they even got to a possible vehicle selection.

There's much better detail in the tutorial at http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...ory-or-product.

[MarkoSiroki]

Now we have big tree of categories, we need it for some advanced features that will be available to the customers, which will allow customers to locate product very quickly, but thank you very much for your advice!

Marko