Types of departments
There are two types of departments you can add to your eCommerce website: Parent departments (also known as Main departments or Master departments) and Child departments (also known as sub departments) departments.
Parent departments can only contain child departments, and cannot contain any products.
Child departments can only contain products, and cannot contain any other departments. A child department can not exist without a parent department to belong to.
Whenever you wish to create a department to put products in, it must be a child department. Before you create the child department, you must decide if the child department will be placed under an existing parent department, or if you will create a new parent department for it.
There are two places you can look to discern between parent and child departments.
The first place is on the Department List page (click the Departments link from your Site Manager’s main menu). In the area that lists the departments, look under the columns called “Parent Dept. Id” and “Parent Dept. Name.” These columns are describing the parent of the department we’re looking at. If the Parent Dept. Id is a 0 (zero), then the department is a Parent department. In the example below, the Garden department is a Parent department, because the Parent Dept Id column shows a 0 for that department. The rest of the departments listed are child departments, because the Parent Dept Id is something other than 0.
If this method does not work well for you, you can click in to a department (by clicking the department name from this screen). This opens a screen to edit the department. Look at the “Parent Department ID” field. If the field has a name in it (as the example below), then the department you are looking at is a Child department, and the department name shown in the Parent Department ID field is the name of the Parent department.
You can change any department from one type to another type, by changing the listed Parent Department ID. If you change it to None, the department becomes a Parent department. If you change it from None to another ID, it changes from a Parent department to a Child department.