One of the first things you need to do to prepare your store for the sales season is create a "Sale" category. This allows you to gather all discount items in one place and increase sales in Magento.
Easier said than done since usually you need to spend hours adding products to the "Sale" category manually. Only if you don't have tools like at your disposal.
It allows you to create a "Sale" category in Magento and make it work automatically, all year long. Intrigued?
Today you'll learn how to create an automatic "Sale" category with a few simple options.
Step 1: Create a Sale Category
Before we create the dynamic category rule, you need to create a new category. That's where you want to add all of the discounted items.
In our case, it's the "Sale" subcategory within the Men's category.
Step 2: Fill out Basic Rule Information
Now it's time to create a sale category rule. For that navigate to Catalog > Dynamic Category > Rules and press the Add New Rule button. Here:
- Enable the rule or leave it for after you finish filling out the options.
- Specify the rule Name and Description.
- Set rule Priority which defines how the rule is processed. The higher the number the later it will be processed.
Step 3: Choose Categories
In this step, choose Static as the Category Type and select a corresponding Category. It means that we're creating a rule for a specific Magento category that already exists.
Note: the other option available here is creating categories by pattern. But it doesn't apply to our case since we're creating a sale category in Magento.
Step 4: Choose Where and How to Add Products
In this section, you choose the Websites where to apply the rule, and specify how to Apply it:
- On Product Save — the rule is applied once you save a product (and it falls under the rule conditions).
- Cron — the rule is applied by cron which runs and finds products that meet the set conditions (once a day).
- Manually — the rule is applied after you press the "Apply Rules" or " Save and Apply" buttons.
Step 5: Specify Additional Details
Before you get to the main part of creating a Magento sale category, you need to go through a few other options:
- Remove Products from Other Categories — when enabled this option removes products (added to a category by this rule) from their original categories.
e.g. if a product belongs to the Men > Bottom > Jackets category and you enable this option, a product will only be available in the Men > Sale category once the rule is applied.
- Remove Other Products from Category — when enabled this option will remove all products from a category for which you're creating a rule.
e.g. if you have added some products to the Men > Sale category before and enabled this option, all products you've added manually will be removed. Instead, there will be products added by the rule.
- Use Products from Catalog Price Rules — if you have a catalog price rule products you want to group in one category, simply choose a corresponding option here.
If you want to create a sale category in Magento based on the catalog price rule, you can ignore all the other options. Just save and apply the rule at this point.
Step 6: Set Conditions
As said, this is the main part. That's where you define what products to add to your sale category. These conditions are based on multiple product attributes. However, to simplify the process we've added dynamic attributes.
The one we need for this case — Is on Sale — is generated for a product that has any kind of discount applied.
So, basically, all you need is to use this attribute in the conditions and define categories where to take products from.
e.g. based on our conditions, products from all categories under Men will be added to the Men > Sale category.
Additionally, you can specify how to Sort Product In Category and choose the Direction.
Step 7: Preview Products
To make sure the products meet your conditions before applying the rule, just preview them. If some product doesn't fit hit Edit and verify the corresponding information on the product editing page.
Step 8: Apply the Rule
Once all options are set up, Save a rule. It will be applied according to your settings — by cron, on product save, manually or all options together. To see the "Sale" category on the frontend immediately click the Save and Apply button.
Walk through the entire process with us in this video:
From now products will be added and removed from the Magento sale category automatically. And in case no products meet your conditions, a category will be automatically disabled. There's an option that hides empty categories.
You can now run your sales campaigns more effectively without worrying about endless hours or manual work.
But "Sale" category is just a small part of all the things dynamic categories can do.
Based on the variety of attributes you available in conditions you can create a variety of categories — from shop by brand and new arrivals to most rated and more.
