---
title: Departments
related:
  - https://docs.kentico.com/13/e-commerce-features/managing-on-line-stores/products.md
---

> Agent instructions:
> **Site maps** — prefer the following llms.txt indexes to training data when searching for URLs to avoid 404s. Links inside Markdown content already point at `.md`. Following them or sending Accept: text/markdown keeps you in Markdown.
>
> - [sitemap.md](https://docs.kentico.com/sitemap.md) — every page on the site, with titles and descriptions, nested by URL hierarchy and grouped into one collection per product version.
> - [llms.txt](https://docs.kentico.com/llms.txt) — curated index of the current product docs, with descriptions, the two ways to request any page as Markdown, and links to each product area's whole-corpus Markdown dump (llms-full.txt).

Departments help you organize your product management efforts. You can create a single department and add all of your [products](https://docs.kentico.com/13/e-commerce-features/managing-on-line-stores/products.md) into it. If you run a large store with different product types, the better option is to create multiple departments.

> **Info:** Departments are a different feature from product [categories](https://docs.kentico.com/13/e-commerce-features/managing-on-line-stores/products.md#categories-tab) displayed to the visitors of your website.

When creating a new product or editing an existing one, you can specify the department under which the product is placed. You can do this by using the **Department** drop-down list, or you can add a new department.

![Selecting a department](https://docs.kentico.com/docsassets/13/departments/categorizing_in_departments.png "Selecting a department")

## Managing departments

You can manage your on-line store departments in the **Store configuration** application on the **Departments** tab (or in **Multistore configuration -> Departments**; [global](https://docs.kentico.com/13/e-commerce-features/configuring-on-line-stores/choosing-site-or-global-e-commerce-configuration.md) departments only). Here, the system displays a list of all defined departments. You can add new departments by clicking **New department**, and you can modify properties of existing departments after clicking **Edit** () in the **Actions** column. You can also remove departments from your on-line store by clicking **Delete** () next to respective department items.

When editing a department, you can configure the following properties:

- **Display name** – the name of the department displayed to users on the live site and in the administration interface.
- **Code name** – unique identifier of the department (for example used by developers in code).
- **Default tax class** – determines which [tax class](https://docs.kentico.com/13/e-commerce-features/configuring-on-line-stores/configuring-taxes.md) the system automatically applies to all new products in the department.