I have a client who has several 100 product categories.
My question is:
"Are product categories meant for internal inventory / accounting organisation or are they meant for external website catalogue purposes?"
The reason I ask is because the client appears to have organised the Product Categories as you might expect them to be organised for a product catalogue. My issue with this is that if they ever want to make modifications to accounting or inventory aspects of the Product Category they will have to modify each category when they could just modify 1 or 2 ( or less than 200 ).
My thought is that if they simply want the categories for organisation in the website or catalogue that product tags or some other "lookup" attribute ( either custom or not ) might be more appropriate especially when effectively all of their products should be treated the same when it comes to inventory / accounting purposes.