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Topic: Selling Topics
Getting Fancy with Custom Booth Categories
One of the top requests we get from book, music, and DVD sellers on Bonanzle: where are the genre-specific categories?
The answer is: in your booth! Booth custom categories let you define your own categories so that buyers can browse through your booth inventory the way you want them to. Below, we'll describe the way it works. This is considered a fairly advanced maneuver that should probably only be executed by professional booth owners (and smart alecks that savor funny booth categories).
Why Not Just Add to the Main Category List?
Because of our emphasis on relentless simplicity, we have striven to keep our categories only two levels deep. The benefits of this are numerous. (1) It is simpler for sellers to choose their item categories without having to traverse a deep hierarchy (2) It's easier for buyers to see all browsable categories on one page (3) No redundant categories such as you'd have when there is a "Blues" category under "CDs," "Tapes," and "Records." Bleck.
So How Do Booth Categories Work?
With booth categories, you can create categories specific to your booth so that buyers can browse your inventory exactly the way that you want them to.
To do it, you just add all categories that you want your booth to have in the "Custom Booth Categories" box on the "Advanced Booth Options" page. Each line is considered a category, so for example, if your booth was filled with monkeys, ninjas, and pirates, your "Custom Booth Categories" box might read:
Monkeys
Ninjas
Pirates
Then, when a buyer enters your booth, the normal list of categories will be replaced by the categories you put in your custom categories box. Note that order does matter. The order that you enter your categories will be the order they appear in your booth.
Also note that your custom categories won't be saved until you click the "Save All Options" button in the upper right corner of the Advanced Booth Options page.
How Does Bonanzle Know Which Items Fall Into Which Custom Categories?
When a user clicks on your "Pirates" category, Bonanzle searches your booth for any items that contain the word "Pirate" in the title, description, or category of the item. Thus, if you are creating custom book categories for "romance" books, you must ensure that the word "romance" appears somewhere in the title or description for the book. Note that since we search item categories, if your booth has items that were categorized as "Books" and "Electronics," you can still setup custom categories called "Books" and "Electronics", and items in those categories will be filtered out when the user selects that category.