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Categories, manufacturers, and tags are three independent dictionaries that attach to a product as a reference to an ID — not as free text. When you create a product via addInventoryProduct, you must supply the relevant IDs; Base will reject or miscategorize products that reference IDs that don’t exist. Make sure these dictionaries are populated before you start uploading product cards (see Uploading Product Data).

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Categories

Categories form a tree structure inside an inventory. Each node has a numeric ID you reference from the product.
Deleting a category also removes the products assigned to it. Products in subcategories of the deleted category are unaffected — they move up to the top level rather than being deleted. Double-check which products sit directly in a category before you delete it.

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Manufacturers

Manufacturers are a flat list (no hierarchy) and are paginated at 1 000 entries per page.

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Tags

Tags let you mark products across the catalog independently of their category or manufacturer — useful for filtering, campaign targeting, or flagging products for internal processes.
Deleting a tag automatically unlinks it from all products that carry it. You don’t need to manually remove the tag from individual products first.

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Before a bulk cleanup

Deleting a category, manufacturer, or tag is irreversible with respect to its product links. Export your current product-to-category, product-to-manufacturer, and product-to-tag assignments before you run any bulk delete operation. There is no undo.
If your scenario requires custom tagging or categorization logic tied to an external PIM or ERP system — for example, auto-mapping PIM taxonomy to Base categories on import — discuss this with the implementation team before you build it. Duplicated logic between your system and Base can cause conflicts that are difficult to debug later.