Update to Product Categorization Options

As you may have noticed, we've made a change to the "Categories" option in your Product Details tab.

In an effort to simplify the shopper experience, we've reduced the number of categories in which you can include new products from two to one. If any of your current products are in two categories they are grandfathered in, but if you make any updates to them you'll need to select just one category. We decided to do this for a few reasons:
- To improve and simplify the way the Marketplace is populated, allowing shoppers to browse a better organized category
- To encourage shop owners to really think about where the product should live

While our categorization will be continuously improved upon, we want this change to help the Marketplace. When choosing your category, it is best practice to choose a sub-category; this will automatically choose the top level category as well. For example, if you are selling a ring, choose "Ring" as the category, and it will show up in the Marketplace in both "Rings" and "Jewelry" categories. If you only choose "Jewelry," the product will only show up there.

Please feel free to ask any questions or if you have comments, leave them below. We're here to help!

Not sure how this works for products that have no single obvious category in the present, rather short list - such as models that more or less fit in both "Miniatures" and "Mathematical Art", or "Miniatures" and "Games" ? Will there be more categories in the near future - whenever this came up in recent times, we were told to use tags, the non-regulation of which resulted in an inflated mess of "invent your tag-du-jour" IMHO ?

Presumably there are some things that don't fit into the more specific categories but by limiting each product to just one, we can get a better idea of what could be missing and adjust as we go, rather than just letting people make things up whenever.

I'm assuming categories are more or less based on what types of designs populate the marketplace most heavily or which are most popular?

For the time being, my miniature city blocks are in the "miniatures" category as they don't seem to fit any other category even remotely but as aimeemoyer pointed out in the OP, having just a general category selected for a product will limit those designs to showing up only if that broad category is chosen and will furthermore become lost among the massive number of results for that general search, unlikely to ever be 'stumbled upon'.

Thinking as a customer, most will likely choose a more specific category to browse a few top results, then maybe move on to the next if they haven't already decided what exactly they're looking for, meaning that they may never come across my product as there is no category for them - and this would apply to all products that don't fit more specific sub-categories. This is a huge disadvantage for certain designs and only compounds the future unlikelihood of a category ever being created for them.

Bottom line, I'm putting in my official request for a "buildings" sub category under miniatures

Yes this more restrictive system allows for us to find a reason to add a "buildings or architecture" or whatever we find that shoppers are looking at in order to search for your products.

For now we'll look at whats in "miniatures" and how those subcatagories could be broken out.

I would love to see an architecture or building subcategory

Not good idea. Many models I have can be presented as art/sculpture and as jewelry/pendant. As example, also, my charms and charm-to-pendant converted you can wear as pendant and as part of bracelet/necklace also. Two categories we are need as minimum in my opinion.

I'm not a fan of this change either -- I have many objects that double as mathematical sculpture and jewelry. It doesn't make sense to need a math category under jewelry when there's already a perfectly good math category.

So here are some thoughts to wrestle with...

There's some good points being made here all around. The fact that you guys are finding multiple categories fitting a product really highlights a broken taxonomy / categorization structure on our end.

Good taxonomy and best practices dictate that categorization should be as close to unambiguous (read: only one really fits the description) as you can get, with further identification/listing through facets, tags, or other means. Discoverability of products that fit a theme across multiple categories (ex: "holiday", or "wedding", and so on), should be shared facets across categories.

This problem also exasperates other issues, such as popularity and sort order inside of each category.

Some examples of that would be:

* A product (listed in: art -> sculptures, and jewelry -> pendants) was purchased by someone. Which of those categories should the product receive plus weighting in terms of popularity/relevance/etc from the purchase?

* A product is primarily considered to be Jewelry, but is listed in Miniatures also because someone thought miniatures gets more views. How do we prevent the abuse of discoverability (read: implied sort order) without a firm sense of understanding of what the product actually is?

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The list goes on. I think that the fact that neither you nor us are happy with the structure and system that is in place is a great indicator of a need to do something that fundamentally works better for all parties involved. And that's what we would like to do.

As Andrew said, the start of that means getting a better sense of what products are available, and where the categorization truly breaks down, and then beginning to improve, expand, and/or restructure the category taxonomy along with finding the right solutions across the board.

Also, like Aimee said in the first post of this thread, this will be a continuous effort that will involve multiple iterations before we "get it right".

After all -- user generated content categorization of products is actually quite "hard"

If it makes sense for any lucrative products a storeowner could always upload duplicate models labelled with different store categories to maintain sales levels.

Are there any ISO product category naming standards that would help with this issue?

I can also see this as being a big problem for Maker/DIY models. They could be DIY jewelry, train model, etc. subcategories. What's more important in such a case? Maker/DIY or the subcategory? They could be considered to be equally important. And I just noticed that Maker/DIY is not listed as a major category on the SHOP page. So are we supposed to change all the existing Maker/DIY models to something else now?

It seems like a matrix category selection scheme would be more appropriate than firm categories with hard-wired subcategories, at least for setting a product type. The bigger problem appears to be how categories are listed on the SHOP page, but it's in the domain of Shapeways to determine how stuff gets sorted into those lists.

Also having a more effective search capability would take some pressure off of the product category issues. Have you ever considered having a third party like Google manage your search engine processing?

I mean, we are 3d printing after all - the possibilities of what someone may be printing are endless so I don't see any scenario in which the categories will be sufficient to perfectly capture the nature of every product without having infinite options for categories and subcategories. I think the two-category option was great the way it was - allowing people to use only one if their product fit nicely into a single category/sub like those that make model train parts, and two if their product, like many in the marketplace, was beyond a "single use" and would actually require two categories to accurately describe the nature of the product.

I think limiting to one category is one of those 'worst case prevention' approaches that is more concerned about avoiding abuse of multiple categories vs allowing designers more freedom for categorizing their designs. Abuse of any system, however it's arranged, will always happen but taking away options from the majority of designers to avoid a few instances of abuse seems like a big sacrifice for a virtually ineffective effort.

As far as people mis-categorizing their products incidentally, that will happen a whole lot more when there are fewer options, I would think.

One option would be to set up a 'custom category' field that allows a designer to add their own and 'tallying' the most commonly used and adding that to the official list once there is sufficient need for a new category. The field could reference the current list and make suggestions to encourage users to select an existing category, or ones already being commonly used (prior to becoming an official category. I'm unsure what this means on the back end but it would be an intuitive and effective way to gauge category use/needs.

NimlothCQ, in response to your questions:

* A product (listed in: art -> sculptures, and jewelry -> pendants) was purchased by someone. Which of those categories should the product receive plus weighting in terms of popularity/relevance/etc from the purchase?

They could receive equal weight. If the product fits both then it should appear in the same relative position among the rankings whether that is decided by popularity, printability, how new it is, number of likes/purchases/etc. While it may be the most popular among one category and show up higher in results, it could also appear further down the list in another category depending on how well it ranks among the other products in that category, which is perfectly fine and natural to the way that the ranking should occur generally and within each selected category. Unless there is the option of tracking which category a product was discovered in and therefore the weight could be added to that category and not to the other.

* A product is primarily considered to be Jewelry, but is listed in Miniatures also because someone thought miniatures gets more views. How do we prevent the abuse of discoverability (read: implied sort order) without a firm sense of understanding of what the product actually is?

This is that 'worst case prevention' scenario I mentioned above. The answer is you can't prevent all abuse. Even in the case of a single categorization option, someone can categorize it as a product they think will get more exposure than one that better fits. The general idea here would be that if it isn't properly categorized, it wouldn't get clicks because someone searching for miniatures is not going to be clicking through on products that are clearly jewelry and that person's efforts to exploit the system would be in vain - and hopefully, this would naturally prevent designers from miscategorizing their products. If anything, this scenario is better than one that allows only one category from a limited set, none of which fit the product accurately.

I have no frog in this fight, but to me this move looks as if you just started with a destructive "do something" move, and at a time that feels precariously close to the major holiday shopping season. People have asked for more categories before, and the reaction, if any, was that categories were considered outdated and everyone should use tags - any tags that came to mind - instead. Now you are making the shop hierarchy just more broken by removing a feature that in all probability helps potential customers find stuff. (Also remember the sorry state of your shop search engine for a brief and painful moment)

^ This. Making a change at all isn't always better than making no change, and less options is rarely a better change than more options, especially when it comes to categorization.

Now I see what happened to the Maker/DIY category. It is no longer a major category on the SHOP page list but it still is a major category on the edit page category selection list. If you had a model set as Maker/DIY it is now being folded under the major Gadget category. If that's not appropriate for your Maker/DIY model you may consider changing the category.

To be honest the categories have seemed broken to me since I arrived.

They're completely arbitrary in terms of depth, with some very specific things getting categories while entire fields of potential products get nothing. I have little in the way of evidence, but figure that they will tend to be self-reinforcing. Designers make more stuff in the categories, figuring it's popular. Customers look at the categories for stuff to buy.

If it were up to me I'd rip them out entirely and make more of the tag system. Basically turn tags into flexible overlapping categories. In searches, give a list of tags common on the hits, for customers to modify their search. Report back to designers what are popular searches, and what are common tags. Show a selection of 'root' tags on the home-page, and rotate them regularly.
If you're worried about people abusing the system by adding many tags, add a weighting system or maximum number or tags or something - should be pretty straightforward.
Also, be explicit on how tag words perform in the search algorithm. Ideally there would be a system which merged interchangable tags together, so both arn't needed in the item listing.

I have exactly the same problem as you Bathsheba.

Only way to solve this is to put up each model two or three times, which is a very bad solution...

I suspect this may simply be because there is no appropriate category for the kind of models you are selling. As I see it, the categories have their place as a fixed top-level grouping scheme above the completely arbitrary tags, so that customers at least know where they are most and least likely to find what they are looking for.

If SW want decrease their sales globally, don't disturb this process. When sales really fall, SW will make available even not 2 but 3+ categories simultaneously to lift up sales and not to become bankrupt. It's my final opinion.

That phrase "abuse of discoverability" was a rather unfortunate choice of wording, wasn't it? If I somehow get my products to show up on a multitude of search engines outside of Shapeways would that be considered abuse of discoverability? Getting product in front of eyeballs is the goal of every store owner to generate sales.

It's fine if you have a need to improve search and product categorization methods on the site because you think it will enhance the user experience and improve overall sales numbers but calling it abuse is a bit hinkey. Storeowners are just working with the tools that have been provided and trying to do the best they can with them. Perhaps by having two categories users felt compelled to enter something into each one. That's hardly abuse if they think they were doing what was expected to assist in generating sales.

In the context given, I took the "abuse of discoverability" to mean "deliberately putting a model in a popular category although it absolutely does not belong there", but I, too, sensed a tendency to view the average customer as a mischievous adversary. Why not provide better categories instead of accusing us of gaming the system ?