Need Suggestion about categories and structure

Question

I need some suggestion about the structure of our categories, it maybe will be different in Magento than in our actual Amazon Webstore.

We are moving away from Webstore, and we build up a new Magento shop.

At the moment we have the follow categories in our actual shop:

http://www.outdoorequipped.com

All categories are in the navigation.

I was thinking, we just can take over the same structure as we already have. But then I came into the follow issues:

• We like to show only a few "main brands" in the main navigation. All other brands we like to point to a "All Brand" page, with a listing of all brands we have.
• A product can be either in a categorie (brand categorie) not shows up in the navigation (maybe not a main brand), but can shows up in an activity categorie.
  • How we need to set and import our products?
  • Do I need to create subcategories under "view all brands", so that they not shows up in the main navigation?

Here is our new designed shop: http://mag.outdoorequipped.com

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

In my opinion, treat Brands as Categories isn't a good plan at all, a product can be assigned to N categories but just to 1 Brand, and a child category can't has more than 1 parent. In the example you'd described, you must copy the entire categories tree inside "view all brands" category to get the same "activities" categories as outside that. This approach could became a headache as soon as your store grows or your catalog change.

For that reason we had been developed a few implementations (with many differences for each merchant) including brands menus, indexes, landings and many more, but always using a "select" attribute for brands.

I suggest you take a look at magento connect, maybe some already developed extension could fit your needs. Hope it helps.