What are categories in Channable?

Properly categorizing your products in Channable is essential when setting up export feeds or APIs. This step ensures that your category tree aligns with the platform you are exporting to, which is necessary for most export channels.

Category discrepancies

Before you begin categorizing your products, please be aware that there may be discrepancies in the categories available in the data model used by the API or feed. If you notice a discrepancy, you have the option to do the following actions:

• Regular updates: Channable updates the data model of marketplaces regularly. However, If you notice a discrepancy, please contact our support team for assistance.
• Marketplace restrictions: It is possible that a marketplace may not provide a specific category for all items. In addition to reaching out to us, we recommend contacting the support department of the marketplace to determine the appropriate category for your products, in order to accurately reflect them on the platform.

Each export channel has its own unique category structure. For example, a girls' T-shirt might be categorized as "Clothing & Accessories > Clothing > Shirts and tops” on Google Shopping, but as "Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry > Girls > Clothing > Tops, T-shirts & blouses > T-shirts” on Amazon.

After adding a new export feed or API, you will proceed to the categorization step. Here are the different methods to categorize your items in Channable:

1. Generate categories

If you import your own product categorization into Channable (often in a field called 'category', 'categories' or 'category_path'), you can generate the category paths using the 'Generate categories' option. You still need to choose the category from the export platform yourself, but you don't have to set the filter rules manually. For further explanation on how to generate categories, refer to this article.

2. Add category

This option allows you to manually add categories using category rules. These category rules contain a field of your choice, a filter, a value, and a category choice. For further explanation on how to manually add categories, refer to this article.

3. Copy categories

If you already have categories set up for the same export channel in another feed or API, you have the option to copy the categorization. This can be useful, for example, if you want to add a second Google Shopping feed for another country. This article provides more information about the 'Copy categories' feature.

4. Skip this step

In some cases, categorization may not be necessary. Find out more about how to determine whether you can bypass the categorization step in this article.

5. Smart categorization

'Smart categorization', is made possible by a powerful machine learning algorithm, which suggests the most likely category for selection in some channels. This feature is available for the channels seen below.

Channels Supported by Smart Categorization

For more information about 'Smart categorization' please refer to this article.