I need ideas on displaying categories for a listing

Question

I need ideas on assigning categories to a listing. The categories will be something similar to what Ebay does. Amazon and the other sites have similar categories for listings. I have a lot of categories and Sub-Categories upto 4 levels deep, like

• Home & Garden > Kitchen > Small Appliances > Coffee Machines
• Computing > Networking > Servers

I need a good solution to display all these categories and also search on them (like how ebay does). I wonder if there is a tree based solution using jquery, extjs or any other javascript library. This is more of an user-interface question. I also need to be able to select multiple categories for both search and on a listing. One solution that sprung up originally was to use auto complete (like stackoverflow tags) as users type to show available categories, but this was ruled out as this will not show the users all the available options.

I hope these requirements make sense. I have not found a good solution to categorise listings from all the websites that I have visited. Looking forward to your ideas.

Answer 1

If your going to have a large user base with varying computer skills (which I am assuming, due to your store description), then keeping it simple would be the best route.

My suggestions would be to just show the current category "level" that you are on. From your examples, You would display "Home and Garden" + "Computing"

When a client clicks on a top level category, the menu will then display all related sub-categories, and so on. It would also be best to include breadcrumb navigation for this.