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For some retailers, they only sell one type of product and it’s easy to categorize all their products for the shopping engines. For others however this can be an overwhelming task, especially if you have many products in a multitude of categories.

Proper product categorization is a critical foundation to a feed’s success on the shopping engines.  Check out this earlier post on data feed categorization for details.

Let’s face it, the word “taxonomy” sounds boring. Couple that word with data feeds and you have a whole new level of ennui. If you are submitting a really good feed to a comparison shopping engine, you’re probably including the “category” values. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here -Why Categorization Matters. Most of the shopping engines require you to provide category values so that the engine understands where you want your products to show up or be classified under.

Merchants often times get lazy and improperly categorize, or worse, don’t provide any category values in their shopping engine data feeds. This hurts them more than they realize; their products show up in unintended departments on the engines, and may get curiosityclicks when displayed there which don’t help your performance. I know it can be tedious and time consuming to categorize every individual product for multiple shopping engines, but it must be done.

There’s a unique taxonomy for Pricegrabber, Nextag, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, Shopzilla and the others. Google Product Search even has a taxonomy called product_type (that is optional but strongly recommended).

Here are a few Do’s and Don’ts on data feed categorization using shopping engine taxonomies:

1. Don’t copy and paste or fill the same category value for all your products. Chances are you have products that are in different categories.
2. Don’t use your store’s categories as they won’t match the shopping engine categories.
3. Don’t leave category/taxonomy values in a feed blank. Your feed will be rejected from the engine, or your items will show in all the wrong places.
4. Do use the correct taxonomy guide from each engine. Every shopping engine taxonomy is different, make sure you have the most up to date version.
5. Do check with the shopping engine regularly to make sure they haven’t added/removed categories from the taxonomy.
6. Do include gender and age information. If you sell apparel and accessories you MUST include the gender and age field as the CSE’s have unique categories for men’s/women’s/kid’s products like apparel.
7. Don’t use categories like “Gifts” or “New Items” or “Sale Items” is entirely useless information.

Here are links to a few shopping engine taxonomies:

Pricegrabber Taxonomy
Google Product Search Taxonomy
Shopzilla Taxonomy
Become.com Taxonomy
Shopping.com Taxonomy