Category tree: definition and role in PIM

In PIM practice, a company usually maintains several category trees: one for the webshop, one for the print catalogue and one per marketplace. Products can sit in several categories at once. Category trees differ from product families, which define the attribute structure.

Illustrative example: a garden retailer's webshop tree runs Garden furniture > Lounge sets. Its marketplace tree runs Home > Outdoor > Patio furniture. The PIM assigns each product to both trees and exports the matching category to each channel.

In a selection, buyers should test how the PIM handles multiple trees, bulk reassignment and mapping between internal and channel trees. Category-level attributes and inheritance can save work, provided they do not replace the product family as the source of the attribute structure.