For anyone else curious.. I have corrected these and they now work … you can use the shortcode [mycats ids=”123,456,789″] where the numbers there are the ID’s of YOUR category thumbnails you want to display.
This is the code that is in my child theme funcitons.php >>> https://gist.github.com/energy0m/6095177
This is my product-output.php that lives in my woocomm theme folder in my theme >>> https://gist.github.com/energy0m/6095181