What is a Shopify category tree?
A category tree is a nested arrangement of your Shopify collections, such as Women › Clothing › Dresses. Shopify keeps collections as a flat list, so Breadcrumbs adds the tree that your breadcrumbs, sub-category tiles and breadcrumb schema are built from.
What it is
Shopify collections are a flat list. A collection holds products, but nothing in Shopify records that Dresses sits inside Clothing, or that Clothing sits inside Women. A theme that wants to show a trail like Home › Women › Clothing › Dresses has no hierarchy to read, even when it wants to.
A category tree is that missing hierarchy. In Breadcrumbs you arrange your existing collections in the Tree editor, nesting each one under its parent, up to 10 levels deep. Your collections themselves don't change: their titles, URLs, products and menus stay exactly as they are.
What it's used for
Breadcrumbs: every product and collection page shows its path from Home down through the tree.
Sub-category tiles: the Categories by Shopgears block shows the collections nested under the one a shopper is viewing.
Structured data: the Breadcrumb schema type publishes the same path for search engines.
One trail per product: when a product is in several collections, the tree decides which one its breadcrumb follows.
How to build one
By hand: in the Tree editor, drop a collection onto another to nest it, then click Save.
From menu: copy the nesting of one of your Shopify navigation menus, usually the main menu.
Magic import: let ChatGPT or Claude draft a tree from your collections, then review every change before saving. Magic import is available on paid plans.
Each collection has exactly one place in the tree, so every crumb links to a real collection page.
Where it's stored
Your tree, display names and style settings are written to your own Shopify metafields. There is no second copy elsewhere, and uninstalling the app removes them with it.