# Catalog: categories & tags

Organise your product catalog with tag-based auto-grouping.

# Catalog: categories & tags

Southbill adds a lightweight **catalog layer** on top of Southbill Products so you can group and filter products without touching Southbill metadata.

## Concepts

| Concept | Where it lives | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| **Tag** | `merchant_products.tags[]` (Southbill DB) | Free-form label, e.g. `blue`, `winter`, `bestseller`. |
| **Category** | `merchant_product_categories` (Southbill DB) | Named bucket with a single `tag`. Every product carrying that tag is auto-listed under the category. |

**Example:** create a category `Shoes` with `tag = blue`. Every product with `blue` in its `tags[]` is now listed under *Shoes* — no manual assignment.

## Managing

- **Dashboard → Products → Categories** — full CRUD for categories.
- **Dashboard → Products → {product} → Tags** — edit the product's tags.

## Filtering

The products list has a category dropdown that filters by the category's tag. Pagination kicks in at 20 products.

## API

Not exposed publicly. All catalog operations go through the dashboard function `merchant-products` (`list_categories`, `create_category`, `update_category`, `delete_category`, `update_product_tags`).