In retail, product categorization is crucial. It directly impacts discoverability, conversion, and compliance by driving the required attributes in search facets. While rule-based systems might work in some verticals, marketplace taxonomies differ significantly, mappings drift over time, and edge cases multiply rapidly.

My client manages over 35,000 unique products distributed across 10 different marketplaces. Each marketplace has its own complex category taxonomy with thousands of categories. Their team was overwhelmed, spending hours daily copying and pasting product data between spreadsheets, manually creating products, and selecting multi-tiered categories for each product in each marketplace.

This situation clearly needed automation. Fortunately, their inventory management system and all marketplaces offered robust APIs that simplified the initial automation process. I created a system to pull updated items daily and post them to the respective marketplaces. This worked smoothly when marketplace categories were known, but new products still required human intervention to assign appropriate categories, a task too complex for simple rule-based processing and perfect for an AI solution.

I enhanced the pipeline with an AI-powered categorization layer after connecting the catalog and marketplace APIs. This layer analyzes raw product metadata (title, description, attributes, images), compares it against each marketplace taxonomy, and predicts the most appropriate leaf category. To maintain high accuracy, I implemented a human review step and guardrails for handling edge cases, balancing automation with necessary control.

The results are impressive. What once required over 60 hours of manual work across the team of five, now takes minutes through a simple API call that returns suggested categories. The system scales effortlessly across their products and multiple marketplaces, remaining resilient against taxonomy changes and drift.

I’ll share more details about this project, including API design, tools used (Flask, ChatGPT, Claude, Linnworks and Mirakl APIs, and LLM integration), and key lessons learned, in a Lightning Lesson this October. If you’re interested in how AI and APIs can create smarter, faster marketplace integrations, join me live for the demonstration.

Tim Maguire is a seasoned Product Manager specializing in APIs, AI integrations, and developer tools. He has led product management teams at leading API platforms such as SmartBear and RapidAPI, where he scaled developer ecosystems and launched governance and automation capabilities. Today, Tim builds intelligent API solutions that bridge commerce and AI, like the Retail Categorizer API you’ll see today, bringing efficiency and insight to complex data workflows. He’s passionate about using AI to make developer and business operations smarter, faster, and more consistent.