Product Catalog Classification and Optimization

Businesses that sell products online expend a lot of time, money and effort in manually defining the attributes of their products so as to organize them for sale. It is a process akin to the work of the corner grocer whose day begins with the organizing of produce well before any sales revenue can be generated. Use machine learning techniques to more efficiently and effectively classify products while generating more profits by simultaneously lowering costs and selling more.

Challenges and Opportunities

Product catalog optimization is central to e-commerce. Having a product available via online channels is irrelevant unless it is easy and indeed intuitive to find that product on your website. Unlike in physical retail, one cannot simply ask a clerk for assistance and have him walk you to the product and discuss whether it is right for you. Moreover, it is a lot easier to click to another website than to travel to another physical shop if you can’t immediately find what you are looking for. Most importantly, product classification is a catalyst for all digital operations as it impacts your search engine, online product catalog and recommender system. It is the first impression that your customers have of how you do business and whether you are a competent, with a well-organized online presence. Until the advent of Big Data, product classification has been done manually which means that it is not only costly and time-consuming but subject to human error and an inability to meet the demands of scale, real-time updates and intimate personalization that today’s consumers require. In addition, catalog optimization is increasingly difficult to manage as the data required to maximize its effectiveness comes from myriad stakeholders including suppliers and the customers themselves. Fortunately, through advances in machine learning, we can address these challenges while offering the opportunity to understand your consumers at the deep level required to retain their business over time and increase the amount of revenue you can generate from them.

Experfy’s world class data scientists, trainers and consultants can help you to capitalize on the most innovative machine learning techniques to optimize your product catalog in the most user friendly, operationally efficient and profitable ways.

Our Solution

Experfy has deep expertise in the application of machine learning to product catalog optimization. Specifically, we have built an advanced machine learning platform that automatically classifies and optimizes product attribute values to improve the search accuracy of product catalogs. The foundation of our approach is to analyze the entirety of your product base and your overall value proposition. Our mission is to identify the triggers that drive sales at your website so as to organize products in the manner that will appeal most to those customers that make purchases. What are your products and how are they currently organized? What are the attributes of your products—size, color, price, etc? Who are your customers and how do they behave on your website? How long do they take to make a purchase? Why do customers navigate away from your website? How do customers access your website and how does that impact their experience of your products? Machine learning insights about these questions can revolutionize your product catalog.

Once these basic questions are addressed, our consultants can help you to leverage the most sophisticated and utilitarian machine learning techniques to calculate the effectiveness of your current product classification model relative to industry best practices such as those of Amazon and Zappos. We require that you provide use with access to your product catalog data so that we can identify which product attributes are most reliable as success predictors for sales. Our work may entail cleaning your data, verifying it and identifying gaps in your online product catalog. We can then help you to extract product data at the item level according to the categorizations and attributes that most drive sales; leverage many different data sources to provide the most accurate product description for your customers; normalize the extracted data; and organize it on your website in the most user-friendly manner. Our data scientists can build customized algorithms at any scale for specific product attribute that are in sync with your classification scheme. In terms of rationalization of business operations and supply chains, our data scientists can use machine learning to identify which features and product configurations your customers demand the most so that you know what to prioritize in sales and advertisements.

Finally, Experfy can help to train your technical and business personnel in how to maintain that data and leverage it in business strategy. Product classification is an organic business function that has a broad-based impact across the organization so staff need to understand how to respond to changes in this dynamic area of retail. They will also need to understand how to communicate the implications of changes in the product classification regime to their suppliers and marketing team.

Tell Us About Your Specific Project

Business Context

• What is the problem you are looking for assistance with?
• Who are your target customers within your industry?

Product Strategy

• What products and services do you sell?
• How are your products organized?

Website

• Describe the technologies that are utilized to present your products to the customer.
• How much data do you have?
• What sources do you use for the data on your website?

Data Analytics

• What data techniques do you use to analyze the effectiveness of your product classification?
• Do you classify data manually and if so what does that process entail?

Project Framework & Pricing

Depending upon the size of your organization, the state of your data and the volume of information to be analyzed, we can complete our consulting engagement in 2-4 weeks at a proof of concept starting at $15,000.