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Using the Category Mapper to ensure a great buyer experience
Using the Category Mapper to ensure a great buyer experience

How to use the Vendo Category Mapper to manually adjust the otherwise automated marketplace product category matching.

Mike Faber avatar
Written by Mike Faber
Updated over a week ago

Once a brand connects their store and accepts partnership with your marketplace, everything is happening automatically. No extra work needed.

Category mapper tool allows you to quickly map or review product categories of brands joining your marketplace. Vendo tries to automatically match as much as brands product categories to your marketplace categories as we can.

You might, however, want to adjust the results of the auto-matching. By doing so, you will ensure that buyers are able to find products from various brands exactly where they'd expect them to be.

How category auto-matching works?

Once a Shopify brand is joining your marketplace, Vendo uses the following Shopify fields from Product organization section for category auto-matching:

  • Shopify Product Type of the lowest level eg. Apparel & Accessories > Shoes > Sneakers

  • Shopify Collection name that this product belongs to

Those values are added to synced product and presented in Category Mapper under External Category.

What actions might be needed on your part?

Depending on categories naming by brands and your marketplace you might want to use the Vendo Category Mapper tool to review & adjust the results of automatic matching.

For ease of use the mapper has a search feature that will help to narrow down the categories in the dropdown - once reviewing a brand that is joining your marketplace it's enough to:

  1. Go to Category Mapper

  2. Choose brand name from Partner filter field

  3. Review narrowed results

Example Category Mapper results before manual adjustment

In example below, the auto-matching of Shopify product categories sold by Luises brand, specializing in Men's accessories & shoes as well as Sport outfits, resulted in mixed results:

  • Shirts & Tops Shopify Product Type was matched to MEN > Shirts & Tops while it should have been matched to Sport > Shirts & Tops so it requires a manual adjustment,

  • Pants Shopify product Type was matched to MEN > Pants while it should have been matched to Sport > Tops so it requires a manual adjustment.

Manual adjustments of Category Mapper results

  1. Click Edit button next to mixed results.

  2. Find in the marketplace category dropdown Sport category.

  3. Choose the best fitting category.

  4. Click Save button to apply the change.

Example Category Mapper results after manual adjustment

In the below example, the auto-matching of Shopify product categories was manually adjusted to a desired matching.

  • Dedicated products from Shirts & Pants External categories of Luises brand will now be discoverable and sold within the Sports category of your marketplace.

Please note: Shopify brands often create several temporary or working Collections which do not belong in the marketplace category tree and should not be matched anywhere e.g. Home page Collection.

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