Structuring Your Catalog

When creating a marketplace, it's important to have a well-organized and maintained product catalog. A key part of achieving this is by planning and modeling your data model using product types, attributes, products, variants, and categories. Here are some steps you can follow to plan and model your data model effectively.

Decide on catalog configurations

Before setting things up, you need to decide on a few key marketplace configuration settings that impact how structured or flexible your catalog management operations will be.

Product approvals

Deciding on product approvals is key to maintaining the quality and consistency of listings on your marketplace. This setting can significantly impact the seller experience and your operational workload. When turned on, both new and changed products and variants go into a review state.

With approvals, you ensure that all products meet specific standards before they can be purchased. Without them, sellers enjoy quicker listing times, but there may be a risk of low-quality listings.

Product approval considerations

For example, an electronics marketplace focused on premium pre-owned audio equipment could benefit from a product approval process to ensure listings meet quality standards and include comprehensive technical details.

Product type strategy

Choosing whether to require product types is a decision that affects how products are created on your marketplace.

Making product types required means each product follows a template that standardizes information such as attributes, default weight, and default tax code. This can simplify processes and enhance consistency. On the other hand, optional product types offer sellers flexibility to list products that may not fit into predefined types.

Product type strategy considerations

For example:

• A marketplace specializing in automotive parts might require product types to ensure listings include specific, standardized information like make, model, and year.
• A marketplace for handmade crafts might make product types optional to accommodate the unique and varied nature of its products.

Attribute template strategy

Your attribute template strategy determines how you control attribute usage in your marketplace.

With a strict strategy, products and variants must adhere to their product type's attribute set. This ensures data uniformity and simplifies management.

A flexible strategy allows sellers to add unique, non-templated attributes to individual products and variants. This accommodates a broader range of products and customization where it's needed.

Attribute template strategy considerations

For example:

• A healthcare supplies marketplace might adopt a strict attribute template strategy to ensure that all products, such as medical devices or pharmaceuticals, meet rigorous standards and include essential details.
• A marketplace for vintage clothing could use a flexible strategy, allowing sellers to highlight unique attributes like era or style, which vary widely across items.

Identify your product types

Identify the different types of products that you offer. Think of how you can group different products together by shared characteristics. You can create as many product types as you need, but try to design your product types in a way that supports maintenance and scalability.

Product type considerations

For example, if you are running a fashion marketplace, your product types might include clothing, shoes, and accessories.

Define attributes for each type

Define the unique attributes for each product type. Use clear and consistent naming conventions, data types, and formats to ensure attributes are easily understood by both sellers and buyers. Attributes can be single-select, multi-select, or date format. You cannot change the data type once an attribute is created.

Attribute considerations

For example, for clothing, attributes might include size, color, material, and style.

Determine where to use multiple product variants

List out the products in your catalog and group them by which attributes apply. This will help you determine how many product options you have.

Depending on the complexity of your product catalog, you may need to use products or product variants to represent different options. To use variants, you'll need to add the attributes that define the different purchase options as variant attributes to the product type.

Product variant considerations

For example, if you offer a shirt in different colors and sizes, you might use product variants to represent each combination of color and size.

Map products to categories

Plan your category trees, including the top-level categories and how many levels each will have. Consider how your buyers will navigate your storefront and group your products into meaningful categories to make it easy for them to find what they're looking for. Map each product to a corresponding category in the catalog.

Category considerations

For example, see the following category tree for a clothing store:

Test your model

There's no single way to model your catalog. This is a crucial part of your marketplace, so take the time to model, test, and refine before you move forward with a product taxonomy.

• Create product types based on identified classifications, defining the data type for each product attribute.
• Model product types for each identified classification, one at a time.
• Evaluate your product types based on your test products and adjust if necessary.
• Create a test product for each new product type, incorporating as many modeled attributes as possible to assess different use cases.
• Test your categories and ensure they make it easy to navigate your storefront.