Caelan Whimsy how would you categorize Walmart? What if you went there looking for fishing gear and the poles, nets, lures, boots, etc were scattered randomly all over the store?

Cooter Coorara But it isnt scattered all over.. Its in the camping section. Just like dresses are in the Apparel section of the MP. Put you stuff in the right categories and people will find it. We really dont need more categories, its chaotic enough..

Drake1 Nightfire my thoughs are that the sub-categories or departments would be used once a customer visits a particular store. For example, I build houses and everything that goes into a house. My thought is too let the merchant create the categories within his store. For myself, I would create "indoor lighting fixtures", "outdoor lighting", "mansions", "houses", "cottages and bungalows", "skyboxes", and so on. A clothing merchant may create "winter clothing", "summer clothing", "swim wear", "shoes", and whatever it is they offer for sale. Right now, the categories shown once visiting a store are the generic ones for the whole MP. It would not clutter any categories used now. It would simply be a list of departments that store offers, created by each merchant. Like I posted earlier, right now once someone visits my store it's just a bunch of items strewn all over, like a Walmart after an earthquake.

Cooter CooraraThey would have to code for every store individually. That would be a nightmare. With the current search index you can search for "winter clothing" and anything with that tag would show up. Giving each store the ability to make their own categories would be insane. You would have hundreds of thousands of categories with what the creator decided each one meant.

Just because you think a scarf is winter clothing doesnt mean another merchant does. So you would have scarves in several different categories.

You have 7 categories of stuff, 78 items. Seems like you are using them well..

ETA you can have those categories of houses now.. You just have to use them.

Drake1 Nightfire actually, as a one-time programmer, this would take practically no work by LL. Their coders would simply add an extra field to each products description of say 24 bytes, create a list of each vendor's categories, and display it on the side panel of the merchant's store page. In my days as a Cobol programmer it would take me a hour or two, tops. With a 4GL like the Mapper or Informix we used in my software company it would take half that time. In my position as head systems analyst and systems designer, plus president of my own software company, this woud have been part of the initial design.

LL would NOT create a database of all of the categories of all the merchants in all of the marketplace for shoppers to sort through.

I had to use an alt to create my lighting store, as many vendors do. It would be more efficient for the MP than having alts with additional stores. It would also reduce storage space on the MP's servers, and also have an added benefit of faster searches.

Cooter Coorara Have you taken a look through they categories already provided by LL? There are thousands of them. I have never understood the need to use an alt for a new category of items. Just put them in the new category in your store. Its like having departments in a superstore like Walmart or target. Each aisle has a description at the end of it. Tells you whats down that aisle.