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To start, you’ll need to think of HOW you’re going to be using your categories.  Do you think of them as keywords for your various products?  Or do you think of them as groups and subgroups?  Let’s say that you sell watches.  Many customers have brand preferences when looking for watches which may suggest that you might like to use one of your levels of categories.  In addition, you will often have customers that are looking more for a piece of jewellery, which means that they’ll be looking at the colour and quality of your watches more quickly.

In this example let’s say that we’re a watch reseller and we’re trying to find a watch for a customer.  The customer has asked for a watch that has the following characteristics: silver band, digital display, and diamonds on the watch face.  By making smart choices when you set up your categories, you can make determining your customer’s choices using inFlow even easier!

In this case we’ll work from the largest groups to the smallest.  Watches only have two types of displays: Analog or Digital (for the moment let’s ignore those new fancy LED Binary watches).  Since these are the largest two groups that the watches we sell can be split to let’s make this our first set of categories.

The next largest groups we have are the division between Gold, Silver and Cloth bands.  Therefore we’ll want to split our watches into these subgroups within each of the larger groups.  This means that because there are two categories and you now have three subcategories in each you will now have six subcategories.

Finally, we know that your customer wanted a watch with diamonds in the watch face.  This will be the smallest subgroup since not many manufacturers will be including diamonds on their watch faces.  Again, this is a two category subgroup so you will have to create two groups for each subgroup available.  This means twelve groups total.
 
 
A few tips for creating your categories:

1. Remember to work in descending order from the largest groups to the smallest.
2. It is usually best to minimize the number of levels of categories you’re employing.
          a. Categories can be different depths, e.g. you can have fancy face and plain face within silver but not
          necessarily within gold.
3.Product List can be filtered using categories to help you find what you’re looking for.
4.Clicking the column header will re-organize your list based on that column.
5.Don’t create a category for something which is already recorded by the program and which can be used to
sort the list you have (for instance: Description [name] or price.
          a.Along the same note you might think of adding a custom field to help organize your products (e.g.
          "Type" = A for analog, D for digital, Material in {Cloth, Gold, Silver}...) and search by those.