How to Categorize Products for Medusa

Understanding Medusa Product Categorization

Medusa is an open-source headless commerce platform built with Node.js and TypeScript, designed to give developers complete flexibility in building custom shopping experiences. Positioned as a composable commerce alternative to monolithic solutions, Medusa provides a powerful backend engine with a modern, developer-friendly architecture that's gained rapid adoption among teams building custom storefronts, marketplaces, and digital commerce experiences. The platform's modular design allows merchants to pick and choose functionality while maintaining full control over their commerce logic and customer experience.

Product categorization in Medusa through its product collections and categories system serves as the organizational foundation for your entire commerce catalog. Medusa's approach to categorization is deliberately flexible, supporting both simple flat structures and complex hierarchical taxonomies depending on your business needs. The platform's REST API and upcoming GraphQL support make categories easily accessible to any frontend framework, whether you're building with Next.js, Gatsby, React Native, or any other technology. Proper categorization enables efficient product filtering, navigation, and search functionality across all your sales channels.

The Medusa architecture separates core commerce functionality into modules that can be customized or replaced entirely. This means your categorization strategy can be as simple or sophisticated as your business requires. Products can belong to collections for marketing purposes (like "New Arrivals" or "Best Sellers") while simultaneously being organized into hierarchical categories for navigational purposes. The platform's plugin system allows extending category functionality with custom attributes, dynamic rules, and integration with external classification systems—all while maintaining the clean, TypeScript-first developer experience that Medusa is known for.

Our AI-powered categorization API integrates naturally with Medusa's RESTful architecture. After obtaining category predictions from our API, you can use Medusa's Admin API to assign products to appropriate collections and categories. For teams using Medusa's official Next.js starter or custom storefronts, our batch processing capabilities enable efficient initial catalog setup and ongoing product imports. The combination of Medusa's composable architecture and our accurate AI categorization creates a powerful foundation for building scalable, well-organized commerce experiences.

Medusa Category Architecture

Medusa implements product organization through two complementary systems: product collections and product categories. Collections serve as flexible groupings for marketing and merchandising purposes—you might have collections for "Summer Sale," "New Arrivals," or "Featured Products." Categories, introduced in recent Medusa versions, provide hierarchical classification for navigation and filtering. Understanding when to use each system is key to effective catalog organization.

Product categories in Medusa support unlimited nesting levels, allowing you to create deep taxonomies like "Electronics > Computers > Laptops > Gaming Laptops." Each category can have a handle (URL-friendly slug), metadata for custom attributes, and optional ranking for display order. The API exposes categories through list and tree endpoints, making it easy for your frontend to render category navigation menus, breadcrumbs, and faceted filtering interfaces without multiple API calls.

The relationship between products and categories in Medusa is many-to-many, meaning a single product can belong to multiple categories simultaneously. This flexibility supports cross-categorization strategies common in e-commerce—a wireless charging pad might logically appear in both "Electronics > Accessories" and "Mobile > Charging." Our AI categorization system provides both primary and secondary category recommendations to take full advantage of this multi-category capability in Medusa.

Common Medusa Category Verticals

Medusa's category system also integrates with the platform's sales channels feature, allowing different category visibility across your commerce touchpoints. A single Medusa installation can power multiple storefronts (web, mobile, B2B) with potentially different category structures exposed to each channel. This flexibility makes thoughtful initial categorization even more important, as your category assignments may be filtered or reorganized for different customer contexts.

API Integration Guide

Integrating our categorization API with your Medusa implementation is straightforward. Call our REST endpoint to get category predictions, then use Medusa's Admin API to assign products to appropriate categories. This workflow integrates naturally with Medusa's TypeScript codebase and existing admin workflows.

import axios from 'axios';

interface CategoryResult {
  category: string;
  confidence: number;
}

async function categorizeForMedusa(
  productDescription: string,
  apiKey: string
): Promise {
  const response = await axios.get(
    'https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php',
    {
      params: {
        query: productDescription,
        api_key: apiKey,
        data_type: 'medusa'
      }
    }
  );
  return response.data;
}

// Example usage
const result = await categorizeForMedusa(
  'Organic Linen Summer Dress Midi Length Sage Green',
  'your_api_key_here'
);
console.log(`Category: ${result.category}`);

async function categorizeForMedusa(productDescription, apiKey) {
    const baseUrl = 'https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php';
    const params = new URLSearchParams({
        query: productDescription,
        api_key: apiKey,
        data_type: 'medusa'
    });
    const response = await fetch(`${baseUrl}?${params}`);
    return response.json();
}

// Example usage with Next.js storefront
categorizeForMedusa('Bluetooth Mechanical Keyboard RGB 65%', 'your_api_key')
    .then(result => console.log('Category:', result.category));

curl -X GET "https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php" \
  -d "query=Stainless Steel Insulated Water Bottle 750ml Matte Black" \
  -d "api_key=your_api_key_here" \
  -d "data_type=medusa"