In my opinion, it is a horrible thing to have a user navigate into a category only to have no items in it. Is there a way to have empty categories automatically remove themselves from the navigation of the site? This would include categories that house items set to inactive on store, (hide category), but active on another (show category on that site)

 

C'mon, this has to be a problem for someone else aside from me.... right?

why don't you just mark the category to 'hide' until you actually put product into it?

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Versalift East, Inc.
www.versalifteast.com

Chasing Time - NW Ohio Band
www.ChasingTime.info

We have 50,000 skus. Items are moved in and out of categories frequently. Categories may have items in them 1 day, and then not the second. As opposed to manually sifting through all categories, removing empty ones, it would be a huge time saver (and a giant step forward intems of usability) for empty categories to automatically hide themselves.

This is the very reason why I don't use the back end for inventory control. The ability to do this would be an outstanding feature to have.

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Best Regards,
Louis
TackleToyStore.com

Definitely a nice to have, i would think if logged in as admin it would still show the categories though, but just say [hidden] next to them, so you can get to them and see them when designing the site and populating it.  If you truly wnat to hide in all regards the 'hidden' flag on the category editor is the proper route, this will really hide the category across all of the store.

Now some people put considerable effort into SEO of their category pages and then poof they disappear, we want to consider this...I'm thinking it would still be active in all sitemaps and link lists, just not the active left navs/top nav controls or subcategory lists.  That way they are still there, you can still browse to them, just not quite as easy.  But engines still want to see them linked from the home or some other proper page though for good pagerank.  Am I making too much of this part of the issue?

Attributes already do just this.  Also, attributes can even be tied to inventory to hide when no "inventory" exists.  Just a footnote.

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Ed Sturrock
AmeriCommerce Product Manager

Ed,

You make some good points about keeping the page there for sitemaps, etc. Removing it form the standard category navigation is what we would be looking for; keeping it in the sitemap is a great idea..... let me know when you guys have iimplemented this

Thanks as always!

Just adding our support for this. We have some sites where a category is empty, but the same category on another site does contain products. (the products have been specifically hidden on one site using the product editor.)

There's currently no practical way to hide the category on one site and not the other.

Note, we did try manually managing categories for the 'empty store': http://www.americommerce.com/kb/?f=77 , however we were unable to make it work as "Adding a category automatically includes all its subcategories" - so when we only added the 'bottom-level' categories that we wanted to show, the top-level category nav structure broke. (i.e. The requested resource was not found).... to fix that we added the top-level category, but then the categories we wanted to hide appeared again.

This has become even more of a problem for us as we add more stores to the installation.  A simple checkbox to hide all empty categories on a store is all we need. Help us out! ;)