Departments are the backbone of your product catalog in CommerceCM. You must have at least one department in your catalog.
Departments have many uses:
Departments can be visualized as a tree with branches. Each department can have sub-departments. Each sub-department can have sub-sub-departments and so on. Your designer should understand the depth of your departments to ensure that the appropriate navigation is used - navigation that works with the style of your site.
In this example, the department Cardio Equipment has 8 sub departments. The menu indicates that Winter Sale! And Clearance have no sub-departments, but Strength Equipment and Accessories do.
TIP: While CommerceCM supports very deep product structure, we recommend a relatively shallow navigation to get products in front of your shoppers. Deeper levels can be implemented as filters.
Departments can use different Display templates. This allows you to merchandise your products the way that you want. This is illustrated in more detail below.
Some retailers create seasonal departments such as “Gifts For Him” and “Gifts for Her” to make shopping easier.
Your site can also be programmed to create specific departments automatically based on certain criteria. For example, a Sale department could show up automatically only if you have a product or products on sale. This prevents you from having to set the sale price and time-frame, AND change the department. When the sale time is over, the product is automatically removed from the department and if there are no products in the sale department, then the department vanishes.
Other common automatic departments are “New,” and “Gifts Under x $” categories. These are generally custom programmed to fit the requirements of merchants. Automation saves management time but reduces the control that the merchant has over product placement. Contact support to learn more.
The department Display Page template is generally used to display search results.