Category hierarchy depth and category count limits
Key Takeaway
The limits on category depth and category count (five levels, 100 top-level categories, 100 subcategories per top-level category, 15,000 categories per catalog) are soft limits. To go past one, first check the impact on performance and related data limits. Then ask Salesforce customer support for an increase, because a store can't add a second catalog.
Categories organize the products in a B2B Commerce store's catalog into a tree of top-level categories and subcategories, so buyers can find products by browsing and searching. The tree has limits on how many levels deep it can go and how many categories it can hold. Most category limits are soft limits that Salesforce customer support can raise, but Salesforce recommends keeping the hierarchy simple.
How categories form a hierarchy
A catalog holds the hierarchy of categories that classify a store's products. A store can have only one catalog. A category can also belong to only one catalog. So a catalog's category limits are, in practice, the store's category limits.
When you create a store, the store gets a default catalog with one category, named "Products".
Each category is a ProductCategory record. The ParentCategoryId field on a category is a lookup to another ProductCategory record, which links a subcategory to its parent. Those parent links form the levels of the hierarchy. The CatalogId field holds the one catalog the category belongs to.
You can assign one product to more than one category.
A store sells work gloves. The admin assigns the gloves to both the Safety Equipment category and the Gardening category. A buyer browsing either branch of the tree finds the same gloves.