How to choose right Product Categories

[iCraft Admin]

As you know, this year we’ve expanded our product categories.
Our new categories are based on the key phrases that people replacement for on Google, making our replacement results pages better optimized for replacement engines.

We are also now allowing you to add same products to multiple categories.
The reason for that is because the same products can be described using different terms and one Category was too limiting in terms of accurately describing the products.

So here are a couple examples of products that fall into multiple product categories.
Hopefully that will give you some ideas for your products.

Baby Blue Hootie Owl Beanie



If you simply describe this product looking at the photo, you'd use terms like Knitted Baby Hat , White Hand-knit Baby Beanie or Baby Blue Hootie Owl Beanie, as it says in the Product Title. Now let's try to find categories that fit those key phrases.

• Accessories > Hats > Beanies
• Accessories > Hats > Babies Hats
• Accessories > Hats > Knitted Hats
• Crafts > Knitting > Knitted Beanies

By adding your product into 4 different product categories, you are increasing your product exposure by 4 times.

Now, let's see if this product falls into any Audience specific or Occasion specific categories.
Yes, it does.

You could also place it into 3 additional lists:

• Occasion > New Baby
• Occasion > Being Outdoors
• Male or Female > Baby (Target Group)

 
So now this product will appear in 7 different product lists and a lot more in replacement results for those specific filters.

Hoop earrings, primitive series



This product could be placed in the following 3 categories:

• Jewelry > Earrings > Hoop Earrings
• Jewelry > Earrings > Silver Earrings
• Jewelry > Earrings > Earrings for Women

I'd also specify that it's meant for a Female.
If you don't, your product will not appear under "Gifts for Her" Category.
Though, I'd specify that it's probably ideal for a Teenage Girl
so I'd choose:

Target Group: Female > Teenagers.

As long as you choose any value under Female Category, like Teenagers, your product will appear in the Female Category.

I'd also specify "Casual Wear" under Occasion.

Please let me know if you have questions about which category to choose for your products. Post your questions here, so others could see the answers.

Thanks!

[iCraft Admin]

Hello iCraft Sellers,

I wanted to bring this topic back to life, because I think it's very important for you to understand what all those categories mean. Associating your products to right categories and tagging them properly will ultimately result in your products being visible on the site or not, and in those products being findable by your potential customers or not.

We are having a terrible time with products right now, as wrong products just keep popping up in wrong categories all over the place. We already spent hours manually moving products into appropriate categories, adding descriptive keywords to product titles and tagging them with meaningful keywords etc. As you can imagine, it's very time consuming for us to fix all the products on the site. That's why we want you to do this job, at least, for your own products.

We now have a very robust replacementing mechanism on the new site that will be able to do a lot of intelligent computing and find relevant products for site visitors. But as with all computers, it will rely on the data you feed it with.

So if you don't describe your products well or assign them to the wrong category, that will mess up our replacement results.
That will also result in your products not appearing in the right places, so your buyers will have no chance of finding them.

As part of the site redesign, we tried to improve replacement relevancy and provide buyers with a lot more ways to replacement for products - by holidays, intended audience etc. But we need your help with that.

I want to show you a few examples of mistakes people make, not to shine the light on them for not tagging their product properly, but to illustrate what I am talking about and hopefully help you in tagging your own products.


Cloning without Changing Product Attributes

I suspect one of the common mistakes sellers do is that when they clone products, they forget to review and update all fields. So they leave things like Audience unchanged and that's causing Baby Tutus to appear under Adult Clothing or Lady's Hair Pins to be listed under Gifts for Grandpa.


Not Specifying Relevant Categories

This product is obviously for a baby and could be good as a Christmas present too, right?
However, it's not associated with the Baby Target Group or with Christmas Holiday.
It will still appear under baby hats and under Xmas gifts (because of those Keywords mentioned under Tags), but a lot lower on the replacement results page than the items that have those Key words in the categories or product title or both.

Product Title: 6-9m Christmas Elf Toque in stock!



What I am trying to say is that each replacement results has its own set of rules, where we apply different weight to different product attributes. So the more reliable product attributes are, the easier it will be for our replacement engine to find relevant results.


Product Title doesn't Match the Product Photo  
 
In the example below product title and tags indicate its a product for adult male. However, you can see a boy on the product photo. This is a particularly interesting example, because computers don't see pictures and if you tell them that this product is for an adult, they will treat it as such.

Product Title: Adult Visor Beanie Brown and Army Tan



Imagine a guy is replacementing for hats for himself and he sees a lot of hats in our replacement results, but they are all looking like the photo below. He will probably assume he's got the wrong replacement results and will try to refine his replacement and replacement again, or worse, he will assume that there are no hats for guys and leave.

Visuals send strong messages, even stronger than text.

Also, people online just don't have the patience to investigate a product listing and see if you actually offer guy's hats, but just didn't have the image to show that or if you can make a custom hat for them.

So please make sure you review all your product listings, place them in as many relevant product categories and tag them carefully. Also, ask us any questions. The fact that nobody responded to this post and asked us any questions about their own products worries me. Either we are not explaining this topic well or you guys don't consider those categories as important, as we do.

I know it's hard to see how your individual products affect replacement results, especially if you can't see the new site yet. But we have an equally difficult job of fixing the replacement results when so many products are not tagged properly. Bad results will make good design look bad and will not improve buyer's shopping experience. Good (relevant) replacement results, on other hand, will make our buyers happy. And we all want that, right?  

[Fairy Cardmaker]

When you have fixed a person's listing... did you tell them what you changed?  I think people didn't respond because (if my experience at my work when trying to get people to fill out their timesheets properly is any indication), people felt this is "doesn't apply to me advice because I must be doing it right."

[iCraft Admin]

Hi Fairy Cardmaker,

No, we didn't tell people which listings we updated and why. We will implement notifications like that later. We just couldn't do it in time when we needed them.