How do I use Item Categories?

Adding categories to items in an auction, especially in estate or consignment auctions, can greatly assist bidders in finding the items they are interested in. This organization helps streamline the bidding process and improves the overall experience by making it easier to locate specific types of items.

Without categories, a bidder may search for items by typing into the search bar. In the example below, typing 'dress' into the search bar will show the green dress in the first lot, but if they were searching more generically for 'clothes' neither lots 1 or 2 would appear in their search:

Searching for 'dress' will bring up results with 'dress' in the title:

However, without categories, searching for a more generic 'clothes' yields no results:

To add Categories, go to the appropriate item on the Admin Portal and scroll down to Suggested Fields. You can then type the category into one of two fields:

Main category - This assigns a primary category for this item in the auction.  This helps bidders search for a specific set of items within an auction (Example - Main Category - "Cars").

Sub category -  This assigns a sub-category for this item within the auction.  This helps bidders search for a specific set of items within an auction (Example - Main Category - "Cars", Sub Category - "Honda")

How do Bidders use this?

Once all the appropriate categories are added, bidders can browse categories by clicking the grid in the top-left corner of the bidding platform:

Clicking here will bring up the various categories, with sub-categories nested below:

In this example, clicking on 'Clothes' brings up all of the items with that category added. You can also see that the category is displayed in the top-left next to the grid:

Further, clicking on any of the sub-categories will bing up the corresponding lots. Using this method avoids bidders missing out on the lot named 'Sneakers' when searching for 'Shoes':