Smart Categories

VeryQuery reads your catalog and works out the meaningful groupings inside it. Smart Categories surfaces those groupings on your storefront as a tile grid: shoppers see your store's actual shape, and one click takes them into the matching results.

What shoppers see

A grid of tiles, each showing a representative product image, the category name, and the count of items in that category. Clicking a tile takes the shopper to the search-results page, pre-filtered to that category.

The categories are derived from your catalog, not from your collections. We read every item's title, description, type, and tags, group items that belong together, and produce category labels that describe what shoppers would actually search for. Categories update as your catalog changes; new product types appear, retired ones drop out.

The tiles are not a replacement for your collections. Collections are merchandising tools you author by hand. Smart Categories is an at-a-glance read of your catalog's shape, generated automatically.

Where to put it

Smart Categories is a section block, so you can drop it on any page that uses sections. The most common placements.

Homepage
Give first-time visitors an instant sense of what your store sells. Below the hero, above the featured products, works well.
Empty search results
When a shopper lands on the search page without typing anything, show them the catalog's shape instead of a blank page. This is a toggle on the storefront search page; see Storefront search.
Collection-page footer
Once a shopper is at the bottom of a collection, the tile grid pivots them into adjacent areas of the catalog without needing to back out.

Add the block

  1. In your Shopify admin, open Online Store, Themes.
  2. Click Customize on your active theme.
  3. Navigate to the page where you want the tiles (Home, a specific collection, etc.).
  4. In the left sidebar, click Add section (or Add block within a section that supports app blocks).
  5. Pick VQ Smart Categories.
  6. Drag it to the position you want.
  7. With the block selected, set the heading (default "Categories") and the number of tiles to show (4 to 12, default 8) in the right-hand settings panel.
  8. Click Save in the top right.

The grid renders on the next page load. You can add the block in multiple places (homepage and footer, for example) with different headings and tile counts.

How categories are picked

VeryQuery reviews your catalog regularly and proposes a small set of meaningful categories that cover most of what you sell. Each category needs a minimum number of items behind it to qualify; tiny one-off groupings get folded into broader ones rather than appearing as their own tile. As your catalog grows, the categories adjust.

You can review the current category set in your dashboard's Intelligence page. There's no manual editing of the categories themselves; this is read-only output from the catalog. If a category looks wrong or you'd like more control, that's coming.

Brand fit

The grid picks up your theme's fonts and colors automatically. Card spacing, corner radius, and typography come from your active theme. See Match your brand if you want to fine-tune.

Pricing

Smart Categories is included in every plan; the only capacity meter is the catalog cap (see Plans).

Turning it off

Theme editor, find the block, trash icon, Save. The tiles disappear on the next page load.

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