Like most shopping carts we do use Categories, but with a couple major differences. In CartGT Categories belong to Departments. In this way, we can keep Categories manageable and easier to modify. Another difference is in CartGT you can have a sub-Category (also called child category) point to either brands or products within a Department. Why do that? Well sometimes there are so many products that fall into a category it is better to have the shopper narrow their selection by first choosing a brand before viewing the products.

For some reading this you may not understand what are Categories anyway? In CartGT Categories are used to allow shoppers another way to view products rather than by Brand. As example, if you were selling fishing lures besides showing the brand names on the menu you could use a category called: "Shop By Type" and then for sub-Categories have Freshwater Surface Lures, Freshwater Spinning Lures, Saltwater Lures, etc... This would allow shoppers who don't know, or care about brand names another way to find what they are looking to buy.

In CartGT each Department can have it's own unique Categories and sub-Categories that will help make shopping easier for your targeted audience. 

If you read my previous blog entry, The CartGT Difference, you may be wondering why Departments are such a big deal to me. First off, Departments are not something I just dreamed up, it's how most retail stores are setup. And for good reason, having brands and products grouped within distinct departments helps organize a store for both the shoppers and the merchants. When you walk into any home center, clothing store, sporting goods store, floor covering store, grocery store, etc.. you start looking around for the department that has what you are looking to buy. It makes shopping faster and easier.

If you are a store owner beginning to setup your product catalog for a e-commerce web site you understand immediately the idea of Departments. Within each Department I can add my Brand names and Products that belong to that Brand in that specific Department. 

It makes more sense than using Categories like most shopping carts do today. Imagine setting up a store and you are told you need Parent Categories at the root and then add child categories. Plus, you can add child categories to child categories and eventually one of those child categories will point to products. That may seem clear to a programming geek but to the average retail store owner that sounds daunting to manage and confusing. Plus, in a large product catalog you may have a long, long list of parent to child categories to sort through everytime you want to make a change.

If you have ever setup a store with a lot of parent to child categories you will love using the CartGT Department concept! 

CartGT's product catalog design (schema) is not like most of the other shopping cart applications. CartGT uses Departments rather than Categories as the fundamental building block for the product catalog. Each category and brand has too belong to a specific Department. This makes more sense to most retailers when setting up their product catalog, rather than having to create a long list of categories and sub-categories. This also allows the CartGT product catalog to be setup just like the departments in most retail stores. Having everything in separate departments makes it easier for the shoppers to navigate your product catalog and it makes it easier for the web site administrator to manage the products in the digital catalog. See the diagram below for a visual of how the CartGT shopping site is designed.