How to properly categorize offers
Properly categorized listings on merXu will help users easily and quickly find your products through a search engine or category tree. Once on the merXu site, customers should intuitively know where to look for specific products, and a well-structured category tree and your offers assigned to it will help them do that.
Correctly assigned products to categories also significantly affect the visibility of your offers in search engines, as well as helping with the promotion of products on merXu's social profiles.
How to add listings with correct category path or update categories in offers already present on merXu platform
How detailed you describe your product and assign it to a category tree will affect the effectiveness of your sales. A precise and complete description means a better chance for your products to be found and purchased. You can put up offers on merXu in several ways:
1. Manual listing through a form - find details HERE
Remember that the Category field is a mandatory field. You will select the category path by expanding the list:
2. Update the categories in the offers present on the merXu platform
If you are already presenting your listings on merXu, but they are not properly categorized, just update the product category.
When you click on a selected offer, you will update its category by selecting the category tree path. This method is advisable when updating a small number of listings already present on merXu. You can find offers in the My merXu > Product Catalog or by clicking HERE
For more than one offer, just select the offers you want at the list of offers in My merXu > Product Catalogue or by clicking HERE and choose the appropriate category for them.
Use the search engine by typing in the relevant phrase, in which case a list of offers with that phrase will be filtered out.
3. Upload files in merXu-compatible format (.xls, .xlsx or .csv) - find details HERE
Remember to choose the merXu category that best fits the products you offer when preparing the file. Try to make the category path as detailed as possible. Provide not only the main category, but also a third-order category path, i.e., in addition to the main category, also subcategories.
When entering the category path, use one of the possible separators: ("|", ">", "/", "\\", "►", "▸", "›")
4. Update the categories in the files (.xls, .xlsx lub .csv)
The best solution will be to assign to the list of your offers, merXu categories. The products will be updated and assigned to the merXu category tree.
You can also send us a file with your bid data along with the assigned merXu (merxu_category_path) or customer (supplier_category_path) categories, which we will try to merge with the merXu categories, but keep in mind that this may not work out 1:1
Under My merXu > Product Catalog, you can export your offers to an Excel file, complete the categories and re-import the file
5. Adding and updating categories in .xml files
We currently honor the standards of Ceneo, Google, Heureka. If you use one of them, you can pin available categories in your listings. Categories that do not appear in the merXu category tree are automatically blocked. If you have custom files, indicate the category path in the xml file structure and contact us.
If you have your own categories in your product feed (not heureka/google), you can also manually categorize your offers into relevant merXu categories. Go to My merXu > My products > Category management or click HERE
6. BaseLinker - find details HERE
Baselinker allows you to assign listings to top-level categories (leaves).
Categorization is possible:
- Global - it consists in preparing the mapping of the store categories to merXu categories. In this case, at the time of product listing, the mapped category will be automatically entered.
- Manual - at the time of product listing it is possible to overwrite the default product category.
Based on the selected product category in Baselinker, it is possible to choose to map additional product attributes.
Baselinker uses numerical category identifiers. You can check the full list of categories in the merXu marketplace configuration or by downloading the .xlsx file with categories from the merXu dashboard:
7. API - find details HERE
The full list of merXu categories can be downloaded through the API by specifying the maximum category depth [ 1 - only department categories will be returned, 4 - all categories will be returned ].
https://api.merxu.com/docs#operation/categories-get
The category identifier (UUID) should be communicated in requests to add or change an offer:
https://api.merxu.com/v2/docs#operation/CreateOffer
https://api.merxu.com/v2/docs#operation/PatchOffer
It is also possible to use category IDs to filter offers: