[Plugin: WooCommerce – excelling eCommerce] Excluding categories from main shop page

I was not able to get the edits to work until I tried this:

Override the woocommerce/templates/content-product_cat.php template by copying it to your-theme/woocommerce/content-product_cat.php and adding something like the following to the top:

if ( is_shop() && in_array( $category->slug, array( ‘donation’ ) ) ) {
return;
}

Obviously substituting in whichever subcategories you want excluded, and using the appropriate conditional tags to apply to the particular pages you want.

https://www.foxrunsoftware.net/articles/wordpress/hide-certain-woocommerce-subcategories-catalog/