Back to blog home

Komet Codes: Category Standardization

Last year we started a pretty large project which consists in building a list of standard products that can be used by any company in the floral industry. The purpose of this project is to accelerate business to business (B2B) transactions as right now this process requires a manual mapping which is cumbersome, time consuming and error prone. 

Since this is such a large initiative we've started to address it one bite at a time, and thus decided to start with the category standardization being that it's the simplest one. We're happy to announce that this project has been completed and available for use amongst Komet companies for a couple of weeks. 

How does this work? 

It's pretty simple actually: each company has a list of categories that they come up with and that they use as the base for their product catalog. Komet Sales has created a list of standardized categories and has made these available so that each company can map their own category to a standardized category. 

Komet to Komet

 

This will reduce the amount of categories that are shown on the e-commerce for K2K companies, significantly improving the user experience. Let me illustrate what used to happen in the past and what will happen now. 

Let's say that a K2K company is connected to three vendors. Each vendor created their "Rose" category like this: 

  • Vendor A: ROS
  • Vendor B: Rose
  • Vendor C: Roses

When an e-commerce user logged in to buy items from the e-commerce, the list of categories would include these three category names, severely hampering the user experience and generating a lot of frustration. 

Now, here's how this works with the mapping:

  • Vendor A: ROS > maps to > Rose
  • Vendor B: Rose > maps to > Rose
  • Vendor C: Roses > maps to > Rose

When an e-commerce user shops online they'll see one "Rose" category in the e-commerce regardless of how the vendor companies call the category. This improves the experience for the end user. 

What do vendors have to do? 

Vendors that are part of the K2K network simply need to map their categories to the closest Komet standard category. It's important to note that products from categories that are NOT mapped will NOT be displayed on the K2K e-commerce availability. 

What happens if there's a category that does not exist? 

Just let us know by contacting our customer support team. As we go along we expect to expand the list of categories in order to accommodate all of the items that are purchased and sold in the industry. 

What happens if I want to map categories but I don't use Komet Sales? 

Please contact us and we'll provide an API token so that you can pull the categories from the Komet Global Codes initiative. 

What's next? 

We're currently working on creating a list of standard colors that will be used similarly to the categories. However, many products can't be truly defined by using a single color, so we will allow each product to be mapped to up to three colors. 

For example, let's assume that we have the product "Rose Bicolor Yellow Circus". This product will be mapped to two colors: Bicolor and Yellow. When a user filters by either "Bicolor" or "Yellow", this product will show up. 

We're confident that this project will add a lot of value to the industry and will help increase B2B transactions for all parties involved. Should you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us and we'll be happy to assist you.