Managing marketplace categories

Mobieus ships a generic taxonomy seeded into every new marketplace, but you'll almost certainly want to rename, reorganise, or extend it for your community. Categories drive both the seller's "what kind of listing is this?" picker and the buyer's filter rail.

This page covers the UI at Admin → mobieusMarket → Categories.

How deep the taxonomy goes

Categories support up to three levels:

• Top-level (no parent) — broad bucket, e.g. "Computers", "Audio gear".
• Child of a top-level — narrower, e.g. "Laptops", "Microphones".
• Grandchild of a child — narrowest, e.g. "Gaming laptops".

Three levels is the floor. When you add a category, any existing category at the top or second level can be its parent; you can't nest under a grandchild. Most community marketplaces work better with shallow trees anyway — SERP traffic on three-deep facet pages tends to be thin, so reach for the third level only when you really need it.

Add a category

1. Click + New category.
2. Enter the name. The slug auto-generates from the name; on collision Mobieus appends -2, -3, etc. until unique.
3. Pick a parent — leave blank for top-level, or select a top-level or second-level category to file under.
4. Optionally write a description. This shows on the listing index when buyers filter to this category, useful for both tone-setting and SEO ("Listings in Strings — guitar, bass, violin parts shipped from member sellers worldwide").
5. Optionally set a listing-fee override in cents. Leave blank to inherit the marketplace-wide fee model. This only has an effect when a paid fee model is active (see Charging sellers a listing fee).

New categories are appended to the end of the sort order. Drag them to wherever they belong on the index page.

Edit a category

Click the category name. You can change the name (the slug stays stable so old URLs keep working), parent, description, and fee override. The Active checkbox lets you reactivate a previously deactivated category.

Reorder

On the index page, drag the grip handle on a top-level category to move it up or down. Children stay grouped under their parent; the drag affects top-level ordering. Child order within a parent follows the order in which the children were created.

Deactivate (don't delete)

The Deactivate button soft-deletes a category — it sets the category inactive rather than removing it. After deactivation:

• The category disappears from the seller's create form.
• Existing listings in that category keep rendering with their original category name.
• The category stays visible on this admin page so you can reactivate it.

There's no hard-delete in the UI. Deleting a category that has listings would either orphan those listings or force a destructive cleanup, so soft-delete is the only path — which keeps your historical listings intact.

SEO benefit

Categories with a description set get a heading and paragraph above the listing grid on the category's filtered page. Search engines read this as the page's intro and are more likely to rank the faceted URL. Keep the description focused on what's actually in the category, not generic marketing copy.

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