Data Feeds & Product Categorisation

[BigB]

I'm interested to know how others go about categorising products from data feeds on your site.

I have been allocating my own category to a merchant's data feed, or splitting a feed between my own categories, but the work involved in maintaining this is becoming a headache.

Do you use the categories within the data feed (if any!)? Or do you keep a lookup table between the merchant's categories and your own? Or do you allocate your own category?

Do you standardise on the AW or the TD categories? Is one better than the other?

I'm considering trying to adopt the categories from one of the networks, and adding default categories for feeds which don't have them. Anyone had much succes with this?

[D-Mac]

IMO the person/company who really cracks this properly is on to a big winner.

Off the top of my head there are roughly 3 options:

1. Hire a thousand people on 5p an hour for ever and ever
2. Use AI
3. Focus on the top 20% categories only (e.g. Kelkoo)

[Rich]

I use a mix of all the ones you've posted. Lookup tables are the best as you only have to map stuff once - either merchat A category B always goes into my category Z or, unfortunately, merchat A product BCDEF goes into my category Z.

This at least means you can automate things a bit, but you still have the problem of merchants changing their categories/product ids etc.

To be honest I'm giving up on that area a bit and just focussing on getting as many products into the search engines as possible. If a user searches for a specific dishwasher, as long as they get to your page that then links to the manufacturer, it doesn't really matter that you can't show other products in a dishwasher category.

I'm a lazy affiliate and I like things that will look after themselves. If you can put in the time involved with matching categories and products, then I'm sure your site is more likely to get repeat visitors.

[watcher]

"merchat A product BCDEF goes into my category Z "

That's the REAL killer - as product BCDEF is probably product KLMNOP as far as merchant B is concerned - and they've kindly shoved it into category X (for X read "Accessories" !)

[Rich]

yep! As I said it takes a lot of work, but at least lookup tables mean you only have to deal with new products and product id changes, not every product during every import.

Your look up table could be: -

MerchantID | MerchantProductID | MyCategoryID
---------------------------------------------
A          | BCDEF             | Z
B          | KLMNOP            | Z

Or even: -

MerchantID | MerchantProductID | MyProductID       MyProductID | MyCategoryID
---------------------------------------------      --------------------------
A          | BCDEF             | 1234              1234        | Z
B          | KLMNOP            | 1234

[watcher]

The problem with having a straight mapping that goes down to individual products is when you have thousands of individual products.

I choose a half way house - get the mapping as close as possible using the merchant categories and then fine tune it by analyzing the product description. A combination of look up tables and pattern matching.

[BigB]

Great posts - thanks.

I feel it's definitely worth putting some effort into this, as I get somes sales through "related items lists", but there's no way I have time to set up product level mapping. - Although maybe it's worth putting this in as an override for a few key products.

So it would mainly have to be mapping of merchant categories to my categories. This is going to be pretty hit & miss with the variations between merchants, but I was kind of hoping it would get me a little more than half way there!

Any guesses at the percentage of mismatches this leaves?