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It currently takes a very long time to set up a thorough store category tree in Zazzle. If I am making a listing for an item that should be placed in a new category several sub-categoies deep, it takes so many clicks!
Aside on the Maths of Making A New Category - Skip this if youre in a rush
To make a top-level category, it takes 2 clicks: New, and 'Edit Category'. That's not bad. But the deeper your tree goes, the clicks goes way up.
2nd level category: 4 clicks (New > Select > Click top-level category to nest under > 'Edit Category')
5th level category: 7 clicks (New > Select > Click top-level category, 2nd level, 3rd level, 4th level > 'Edit Category')
If you were making a 5th level category from scratch, that would make 2+4+5+6+7=24 clicks.
And this is all if you do it while creating a product listing. If you do it in category management, you also have to factor in whole pages loading for each click.
New Idea: Text Editor
Here is my idea. It would be great if there were a plain text editor to plan out the department tree.
It could use a symbol like a > to indicate a subcategory
For example, a tree for clothing and then womens clothing and then shirts could be typed out like this:
Apparel > Womens > Tops
A whole apparel tree may look like this:
Apparel
Apparel > Womens
Apparel > Womens > Tops
Apparel > Womens > Tops > T-Shirts
Apparel > Womens > Tops > Sleeveless Tops
Apparel > Womens > Tops > Outerwear
Apparel > Womens > Tops > Outerwear > Sweaters
Apparel > Womens > Bottoms
Apparel > Womens > Bottoms > Leggings
Ideally there would also be a functionality where if you tried to delete a line / category, you would be prompted where you'd like those items to be moved - to a new category or to an 'unsorted' category.
The benefit of a system like this would be the speed at which one could make new categories - as fast as typing. This would be multiplied by being able to copy lines and edit them, to make a new department and all its subcategories even faster. For example, I could copy the above line and change Womens to Mens.
Another benefit would be the clarity. I can see the whole tree on one screen. It's easier to tell if I am missing a category or need to copy one from say, the Mens branch to the Womens branch.
Another alternative way to design the category tree could be a flowchart. Again, the ability to copy and paste pieces would be very important to increasing efficiency of tree editing.
One last suggestion I would like to make is that clearly Zazzle already has a very good department tree set up. There probably are people who don't want to mess around with having to invent their own, especially if they are new to Zazzle and POD in general. It could save a lot of time for such people if the personal category tree could just be a copy of the Zazzle Department tree. And then simply hiding categories on the Store page if they are unused i.e. contain 0 products.
Thank you to anyone who read all this. I know it's a long post. And I acknowledge any efforts to improve the category system would be a huge undertaking in time and effort. I hope my ideas can be helpful to that end.
