Category Mapping - constantly changes??

Submitted by paul30 on Sat, 2008-10-11 05:28 in Price Tapestry

Hello, just a question here:

Is it normal for stores to constantly change their categories?

I mean I just received my product feed for this week and there are a lot of categories missing from the last feed... - I mean AT LEAST around 200 - 500 of them (I have around 50.000 products)

I thought the merchants would not be changing their store category names... I am frustrated... I spend a month mapping categories, (I had around 10 to 50 categories mapped in to a single category for each of my category) and now after a new feed import, a lot of them dont even have any products, because the merchants have changed their category names!

Is that a normal behavior for the rest of you?

Thanks

Pasha

Hi Pasha, It sounds

Submitted by support on Sat, 2008-10-11 08:24

Hi Pasha,

It sounds surprising that so many have changed, but the quality of the information in datafeeds does vary considerably from merchant to merchant. Are the new categories coming out wildly different? I'm wondering if a sort of "wildcard" mapping which has helped another user out might be an option:

http://www.pricetapestry.com/node/1892

Cheers,
David.

hello pasha, sorry for my

Submitted by zeetv75 on Wed, 2008-10-15 09:50

hello pasha,

sorry for my poor english :-)

i have about 7.500.000 products indexed and 40.000 categories.

i made categories > sub categories > sub-sub categories and i maped all theses.

in final i have 1500 categories and sub categories.

each week i have to map 1000 new categories ! because merchant change sometimes a little the title of the categorie :
ex : electronics > dvd player > divx become : electronics > dvd player > divx player and after : electronics parts > dvd > divx, etc..

it take time to remap all theses categories.

i work with about 500 feeds.

Hello zeetv, With so much

Submitted by support on Wed, 2008-10-15 21:52

Hello zeetv,

With so much work put in to your mapped categories etc.; do you have that part of your database backed up?

phpMyAdmin has a tool to "Export" any table, so you could export the "categories" table of your Price Tapestry database and save the output to disk. Otherwise, whichever tool you used to create the database initially should have a similar feature. Let me know if you're not sure about this...

Cheers,
David.