There are 3 ways to add products to a category:

To filter by one of AIQ Ecommerce's preset filters, select "Filter by brand, category, discounts etc..." then select one of the preset filters.

Examples:

Select how you would like to sort your filtered items: Alphabetically, Top Sellers, Top Rated.

You also have the option of pinning items to be featured at the beginning of your custom category. See Pinning Products.

This is the name that will display on your menu. Keep it short and sweet.

Note for multi-store organizations: Since categories are completely customizable and per store, if you want a system category to only display once when viewing Organizational-level settings (offers, analytics), use the exact same name across stores: e.g. "Beer" should be consistent across all stores (case sensitive), if you use "beer", or "Beers", these will show separately.

This is the path that will be in your store's URL. For example, if you created a category called "Coffee", the default slug would be coffee, and your URL for this category would be domain.com/menu/categories/coffee. You can change your slug to be different from the category name if desired.

Optional. This is intended to show a short description on the home page and at the top of the category pages.

Optional. This is intended to show a more detailed description of the category. This also includes an update that allows you to use our rich text editor to customize the content in this section. Currently supported is paragraph, bold, H2, H3, H4 and links. This long description will be inserted at the bottom of your category pages.

You have the ability to toggle a category as system or non-system.

System Categories are your categories that are always present on your menu (e.g. a Beverage store would have system categories of Beer, Wine, Liquor, etc.). These will show in any "Categories" filters throughout the app and in your menu. They also will show in your Analytics breakdown by category.

Non-system categories are good for use cases such as:

POS Mapping only shows for system categories, see POS Custom Mappings.

For certain industries, a compliance dropdown will be available for system categories. Make sure you are appropriately mapping your category to the relevant compliance category. These enforce purchase limits on your menu.

Quantity Thresholds on products allow you to hide products when they hit a certain quantity; this can help alleviate issues with overselling. Here you can set a default at the category-level. See Product Quantity Threshold.

Enable/Disable a category from your home screen, in the example below I could toggle on/off "Offers", "Coffee", etc.

By default every category you create will show on your home page in the list view. Data has shown that customers don't typically scroll past the first or second category, so there's no need to have a ton. Thus, we recommend limiting the number of categories you show here, which can also vastly improve your menu's performance (speed).

See Custom Icons

This will be the default image for all missing product images in this category. We recommend an image size of 500 x 750 pixels.

If you need assistance, reach out to AIQ Support anytime via chat widget within your AIQ Dashboard.