A leading home improvement retailer in the USA.

Our client had a complex classification system with 6000 product types and 4 levels of hierarchy in their taxonomy. The process of categorizing SKUs was largely manual. This was not just a problem for them, but for their suppliers as well, who had to perform this exercise for every single product they onboarded. It was tedious and confusing, and oftentimes, suppliers would end up picking the wrong product type or just throwing everything into a “miscellaneous” bucket. For a while, our client managed by manually correcting the misclassified product data. At one point, their catalog grew to 2 million SKUs, and what was difficult became impossible.

They turned to dataX for an automated classification and onboarding system.

We built an auto-classifier to correct and reclassify all their existing product data into the specified taxonomy. This was up and running within a short period of 8-12 weeks. What about new data? And data from suppliers? We created a pipeline through which all new data, including supplier data, would be processed and classified. Any supplier wishing to onboard their data would simply use this pipeline.

We didn’t stop there. We performed a deep enrichment of the catalog data by extracting attributes from PDF data sheets and providing a dashboard for the content team from our client’s side to make edits, validate and upload enriched data into their PIM.

So the first part of our solution was to streamline the backend taxonomy and set it up for any kind of scaling and future processing.

The future was not far off! Looking at the highly organized nature of the backend taxonomy, our client asked us to map the same to the customer facing displays as well. Essentially, what this meant was that an entirely new display taxonomy would have to be defined and created. Why entirely new? Because the way products are displayed to the customer would be slightly different from the way they are categorized in the database. For example, a customer looking for recyclable products may key in search words like “green” or “environment friendly”, and our system needs to be smart enough to figure out that they are not talking about colors and plants. DataX was more than up to the task of creating this one-to-many mapping.

Based on customer search terms and Google AdWords, and taking into account variations within product categories, we created a finely tuned display taxonomy. Using this, we optimized product display pages that included left hand navigation panels, auto-generated product titles, descriptions and breadcrumbs – all of which leveraged robust backend product data to provide enhanced ecommerce shopping experience to the end customer.

A huge improvement in e-commerce performance. Our client reported 25-30% higher click-through rates. When a customer searches for, say, “waterfall edge laminate countertops”, and gets the 30-odd relevant products instead of every kind of countertop in stock (perhaps 100s of them), they are more likely to explore and buy. This kind of granularity in the display taxonomy made it possible for us to create a trail of breadcrumbs telling the customer exactly how their navigation was going. A smooth and responsive e-commerce shopping experience, where customers were highly likely to find what they were looking for, was the direct result of a clean and organized backend product catalog.