An outdated category is a shop window with the wrong sign. The weekend promo ends and your "Sale" category still shows full-price products. A product sells out and still sits first in "Last units". A new product goes live and doesn't show up in "New arrivals" until someone remembers to add it.
In Tiendanube, categories are kept up to date by hand. With 50 products, that works. With thousands of products, several people in the admin and an ERP that updates the catalog every night, keeping them current becomes a daily job nobody has on their list.
That's why at Innovate we built AutoCat, our automatic categories app for Tiendanube and Nuvemshop. You set the rule once and the category keeps itself up to date.
The cost of moving products by hand
Categories are how your customers move through your store. When they show the wrong thing, you don't see it in the admin: you see it in the store.
- Deals that are no longer deals. Customers click for the discount and find full price. It's the fastest way to lose the trust your campaign just earned.
- Last units with no units left. A sold-out product takes the spot of one you could actually sell.
- New products that never appear. The product is live, the photos are there, but the category that should show it never got the memo.
This isn't a small problem, and it isn't only a small-store problem. According to Baymard Institute, up to 64% of the leading ecommerce sites it analyzes have mediocre or poor homepage and category navigation. If the biggest stores struggle to get navigation right, a category that depends on someone updating it by hand is bound to fall behind.
Why the problem grows with your catalog
In Tiendanube, each product is assigned to its categories from the product page or through a bulk edit. That works well to build the store. The trouble starts later, when the catalog keeps moving:
- Prices change every week. Every promo opens and closes a category.
- Stock changes every day. What's "last units" today is sold out tomorrow.
- More than one person edits the catalog. Each with their own criteria, and no record of who moved what.
- The ERP overwrites the data. If your management system overwrites tags or categories every night, whatever was sorted by hand in the morning is gone.
If you come from Shopify, you know automated collections, built from conditions. Tiendanube has no native equivalent: categories are assigned by hand or with help from Lumi, but always on request, not through rules that keep themselves up to date. That's the gap AutoCat fills.
Automatic categories for Tiendanube with AutoCat
AutoCat turns your categories into smart categories: instead of picking product by product, you define what products must match and the app keeps the category up to date.
- One rule, from menus. "On sale", "fewer than 5 units", "from this brand", "added in the last 30 days". No coding needed.
- Preview before saving. You see live which products will go into the category.
- It keeps itself up to date. When a price or stock level changes, or you add a new product, AutoCat updates the category within minutes, and it also reviews the whole catalog periodically.
To get started there are four ready-made templates: Sale, New arrivals, Last units and By brand. If you need something of your own, combine conditions: name, tag, brand, price, discount percentage, stock, date added, another category, published status or a custom field.
Custom fields let you build sections like Shop the Look, Look of the week or Summer capsule: tag products with a field and the category builds itself. If you base the rule on a field your ERP doesn't overwrite, it works even if your system overwrites tags or categories every night. And if the ERP removes a product that should be there, AutoCat puts it back within minutes.
Built not to break anything
Your catalog is your business. That's why AutoCat works with safeguards and keeps a record of everything:
- Your manual categories stay untouched. AutoCat only manages the categories it creates or the ones you turn into automatic categories.
- Safety brake. If a change is about to remove far more products than expected, AutoCat pauses it and asks you to review it before applying it.
- Pin and exclude. If a product must always be there, or never, you pin it or exclude it, whether it matches the rule or not.
- Activity log. Every product that goes in or out is logged with its reason, so you always know why a product is (or isn't) in a category.
Already have categories set up? You can turn them into automatic ones. Before confirming, you see which products go in and which go out, so nothing changes without you knowing.
Pricing and how to install it
AutoCat has a single plan at USD 8 per month, with every condition, the safety brake and unlimited smart categories. The price is the same for every store, and Tiendanube bills the subscription in your local currency.
The first 15 days are a free trial. It works on Tiendanube and Nuvemshop, in Spanish and Portuguese.
AutoCat is now available on the Tiendanube App Store: install it from there and start building your automatic categories in minutes.
Your catalog, always up to date
Every big date, from CyberMonday to Black Friday, fills your store with promos that start and end. Each one leaves categories to sort out. What changes with AutoCat is that this task no longer depends on someone remembering it.
Want your categories to keep themselves up to date? Install AutoCat from the App Store.
And if you want to think about your Tiendanube store beyond the catalog, let's talk.
