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Phillip Stack, Phillip

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.

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Ermin Trevisan
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There are website product categories exactly for this purpose. You can see them when you install the website_sale module.

By default, you have the internal product categories for inventory/accounting/reporting purposes, the website product categories for organizing the products on the website (they are even manytomany), and the POS categories, which allow for an efficient way to organize products for fast POS operations.

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Phillip Stack, Phillip
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So you would agree with me that product categories are not meant for organisation of website or client facing categories.

I will have to look into this module. I have not really implemented Odoo for any organisation that conducts "conventional" E-commerce. Most of my clients are manufacturers of products which they do not really expect to sell via a web portal or online shop. For this reason I usually end up building something custom and haven't felt a need to look at the website_sale module. My concern is that enabling website_sale will enable a bunch of UI components and features that I will have to modify / remove. I would prefer to simply write something from scratch.

Ermin Trevisan

See my amended answer. If you do not sell online or present your products online, there is no reason to use website categories and to install website_sale. If you want to present your products online, but for presentation purposes only without the possibility to buy online, you can still use website_sale, but remove the shopping cart, see for example www.restaurant-roessli.ch/shop

Phillip Stack, Phillip
Author

Thanks Ermin, I always appreciate your insights. Have a good one!

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