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Organizing your products and services is crucial for creating a seamless and intuitive experience for both your team and your customers. At Salesbuildr, we understand the importance of a well-structured catalog, which is why we've designed a powerful category management system. This comprehensive feature allows you to create, customize, and manage categories with ease, ensuring that your offerings are logically organized and easily accessible.
With Salesbuildr's category management, you have complete control over the structure of your catalog. Whether you need to create new categories, subcategories, or rearrange existing ones, our user-friendly interface makes it a breeze. Drag and drop functionality enables you to effortlessly reorder your categories, ensuring that your products and services are presented in a way that aligns with your business goals and customer needs.
But that's not all – Salesbuildr's category management goes beyond simple organization. You can configure advanced settings, such as mandatory or optional add-ons, category-specific pricing rules, and visibility controls, allowing you to tailor the customer experience to perfection. Additionally, you can create customer-specific categories, enabling you to build personalized storefronts and tailor your offerings to meet the unique requirements of each client.
In the following sections, we'll dive deep into the capabilities of Salesbuildr's category management, providing you with step-by-step guidance on how to create, configure, and optimize your catalog structure.
Read "Managing Products and Services" to learn about how Salesbuildr categories are linked to Autotask categories and how Salesbuildr imports products and services.
Creating New Categories in Salesbuildr
To create a new category in Salesbuildr and link it to a new category in Autotask, follow these simple steps:
Create the new product category (or service code) in Autotask
Create the new subcategory in Salesbuildr
Link your new Salesbuildr category to the correct Autotask product category (or service code). This will ensure that new products are correctly created in the linked Autotask category.
Connect your new Salesbuildr category to the correct billing code in Autotask by navigating to Admin, Autotask, Billing codes. This will allow Salesbuildr to create products or services with the correct billing code.
We hope this helps you understand how to manage categories and subcategories in Salesbuildr. If you have any questions, our customer success team is here to help.
If you need help in designing a category structure for your portfolio, we have published a starting point here.
Managing existing categories in Salesbuildr
To make changes to your category structure, navigate to the categories section from your dashboard. Here you can reorder, create, delete, rename and change the settings for categories as needed. The columns will show you if a category has hidden availability, the amount of products, wheater add-ons are configured, if shipping rules are applied or is set to hidden for non-admins.
Learn how to configure mandatory or optional add-ons for specific subcategories by reading this article.
Watch the overview to quickly learn how categories and subcategories work
Creating customer specific categories
Creating customer-specific categories is a powerful feature that allows you to build tailored storefronts and product portfolios for your clients. Here's a simplified guide on how to create and manage these customized categories:
Establish a Dedicated Customer Category: Start by creating a new root category specifically for your customer. This category will serve as the foundation for their personalized storefront or portfolio. Activate the company whitelist feature and add the customer's name to grant them exclusive access to this category.
Organize with Subcategories: Within the customer's root category, create subcategories to logically organize your offerings. These subcategories can be based on product types, such as "Hardware," "Software," or "Services," or any other logical grouping that suits your customer's needs.
Populate with Existing Products: Once your category structure is in place, you can populate it with existing products or services from your catalog. Navigate to the product edit dialog, select the "Category" tab, and add the customer-specific category as either a primary or secondary category for the desired product.
Customize with Add-ons: Optionally, you can configure customer-specific add-ons within the category. This feature allows you to bundle complementary products or services, creating tailored packages that cater to your customer's unique requirements.
Choose the Right Category Type: When adding products, you have two options:
Secondary Category: Add the product and use the customer-specific subcategory as a secondary category. This approach allows the product to remain accessible from other categories in your main catalog.
Primary Category: Move the product to the customer-specific subcategory and make it the primary category. This option is ideal when the product or service is uniquely tailored for a specific customer and should only be visible in their dedicated storefront or portfolio.
By following these steps, you can create a personalized and curated experience for your customers, ensuring that they only see the products and services relevant to their needs. This level of customization not only enhances the customer experience but also streamlines your sales processes, allowing you to focus on building strong, long-lasting relationships with your clients.
Add an existing part number with a different price and add-ons
Sometimes you want to offer the same product but with a different price and add-ons configuration. You can quick add a new product based on and existing part number and configure a different set of add-ons and pricing.
After taking one of these steps you customer can now see and order the products you have added to their categories. Don't forget to enable self service ordering on the customer admin tab.
What can you configure for categories?
General Info tab
Setting a name
Sets the name for the subcategory.
Setting a description
This enables you to provide some clarity as to what this category contains.
Setting a Category Image
You can add an image for each subcategory, which will appear on your category page. If you don't add a category image, Salesbuildr will use the image of the first product in the category.
Set a short category description
This enables you to provide some clarity as to what this category contains and is used for the pages meta description.
Cost Center
Cost centers can be setup by navigating to Admin, Configuration, Products. When added, products in this category will have this cost center attached to it. This information can be used in combination with the API to feed downstream processed with meta information for billing and reporting.
Term
This field can be used to automatically set the billing term for a product when you add it to the category.
Default markup for products
This can be used to automatically apply a rule based markup or margin on the cost of the product.
Learn how to setup dynamic pricing to automatically calculate your sales price based on the latest cost price of your preferred distributor by reading this article.
Shipping type
You can set the shipping that will automatically be applied to a quote when products from a specific category are added. Read this article to manage shipping costs that can be applied to quotes manually or automatically based on the subcategory settings.
Add-ons tab
Te add-ons tab enables you to set business rules for up-and cross sell items. You can pick any item from your sales portfolio and add it as either a required or optional add-on. for the product in this category.
Any time you add a product from this category to a quote, Salesbuildr will automatically add the mandatory items to the proposal and enables the optional add-ons so that the quote creator can pick and choose which add-ons will be offered to the customer as an option.
Settings tab
The settings tab enables you to configure the category settings.
Quote description
Any content you add to this field will be automatically added as intro to any products you add to a quote from this category what ends up looking like this:
Hidden
Enabling this setting will hide the products in this from users who are do not have the product editor permission.
Hide Product Availability
Enabling this setting will hide the product availability in this category.
Use logo/product image as primary image if media not available
This will use the category logo if no product image has been set.
Enable company visibility whitelist
By enabling the company visibility whitelist, you can choose if and what customers can view specific categories or subcategories. This allows you to create customer specific category structures to be used in custom storefronts for your end customers. If you add a customer to the whitelist of a main category, the underlying subcategories will also be visible and accessible for that customer.
Only admins can add products into this categories
This enables you to only let admins add product to this specific category.
Changing the Order of Products within Category Pages
Watch the video to learn how to set the order in which products are displayed in categories.
Comparing products
Salesbuildr has a compare feature that can be used to offer side by side product comparisons. From the product category page, select the products that you want to compare and click on compare products. Thi also works for end customers that use the customer storefront.
