It's important to differentiate your categories from the category menu entries. Both are equally important but they lend different functionality.
What is the difference?
It is important to highlight the difference between your navigation menu (menu entries) and your categories (taxonomy). Your taxonomy only includes "purchasable" categories and it's an internal structure, while a category menu entry is a mix of different links and images that guides the customer through your site, shop and content.
Categories
Think about all those items that you want to sell in your site, and how would you group those items, that process is called "categorisation" also known as "taxonomy".
Let's think about John's Shoe Shop as an example. John is ready to move his business to an online platform and bring all his sellers onboard. John sells shoes for women, men and children, but also he sells accessories like leather care and other leather articles such as belts, handbags, wallets, etc.
Here's an example of John's categories (taxonomy). John decided to create 2 parent categories: Shoes and Leather Accessories (level 1), each parent has child categories (level 2) that group sub-categories.
Learn more about categories here.
Category Menu Entries
Your navigation menu is a helpful tool for buyers when they are browsing your site. It's the gateway to a lot of the content you provide and it's a great way to promote particular areas/products and guide buyers in the right direction.
The category menu entries can include images and links to different types of pages such as promo pages, blog articles, advert page, directory and external links.
Learn more about category menu entries here.
Additional Resources
This video is a guide on how to create a Categories and Category buckets on your Marketplacer site.
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