When do you have too many categories? Maximum allowed?

Does anyone know when or if having more than 1000 categories will slow down a site significantly?

Does anyone have any experience / examples of similar sites?

When do you have too many categories?
I would say for your customer's ease of finding and navigating that one needs to layout their cats with thought...

1000 & I would have to scroll and scroll just to see all of them and would most likely determine that whoever designed this did not know what they were doing , did not deserve my business, nor would I trust them with my business and leave

Is that 1000 top level categories or 1000 total (top + subs)?

I would like to make a site like this:

https://www.andysautosport.com

They seem to have thousands of categories or product matrix's...

for instance..

one could navigate through products like this:

ACURA > INTEGRA 90-93 > EXTERIOR > BRAND A > FRONT BUMPERS >

How could something like this be achieved?

I was thinking of setting up something similar on my site, but I would need catgeories to automatically hide themselves if they had a product count of zero.

Through their make, model, & year selectors they are using what is termed "dependant" attributes....
ZenCart does not have support for dependant attributes by default at this time. As open Source, one can add this or hire it done....as I have not seen anyone contribute this at this time

I see, thanks for the info! I've been looking for the official name for some time now.

Do you know if OS Commerce or MagentoCommerce (shudder) supports this?

I also have not seen any opensource solution that supports this feature.