How to Categorize Products for Saleor

Understanding Saleor Product Categorization

Saleor is a high-performance, open-source headless commerce platform built with Python and Django, featuring a GraphQL-first API architecture. Designed for developers who need complete flexibility in crafting custom storefronts, Saleor has become the platform of choice for brands seeking modern, composable commerce solutions. Unlike traditional monolithic e-commerce platforms, Saleor separates the commerce backend from the presentation layer, enabling teams to build unique shopping experiences using any frontend technology while maintaining a powerful, scalable commerce engine.

Product categorization in Saleor serves as the foundation for organizing your headless commerce catalog and enabling intuitive product discovery across any frontend implementation. Categories in Saleor are hierarchical entities that can be queried through GraphQL, allowing your React, Next.js, Vue, or mobile applications to dynamically render category navigation, product listings, and faceted search interfaces. The platform's flexible category system supports unlimited nesting depths, background images for category pages, SEO metadata, and rich descriptions—all accessible through strongly-typed GraphQL queries that provide excellent developer experience and runtime type safety.

The headless architecture of Saleor means that category organization directly impacts API query efficiency and frontend performance. Well-structured categories enable efficient GraphQL queries that fetch exactly the data needed for each view, reducing payload sizes and improving page load times. Products can belong to multiple categories, and Saleor's GraphQL schema exposes these relationships through navigable connections, allowing frontends to implement sophisticated cross-category browsing and related product recommendations without additional API calls.

Our AI-powered categorization API integrates seamlessly with Saleor's GraphQL ecosystem. After obtaining category predictions from our REST API, you can use Saleor's productCreate or productUpdate mutations to assign categories directly. For teams using Saleor Cloud or self-hosted Saleor installations, our batch processing capabilities enable efficient bulk categorization of large product catalogs during initial migration or ongoing product imports. The combination of our AI accuracy and Saleor's developer-friendly architecture creates a powerful workflow for maintaining organized, discoverable product catalogs at scale.

Saleor Category Architecture

Saleor implements categories as a flexible, hierarchical structure accessible through GraphQL queries and mutations. Each category in Saleor can have unlimited subcategories, creating deep taxonomies suitable for complex product catalogs. The platform's category model includes fields for name, slug, description, SEO title, SEO description, and background image—providing everything needed for rich category landing pages in your headless frontend.

The GraphQL schema exposes categories through the categories query for listing operations and category query for fetching individual categories with their products. Category relationships are modeled as navigable connections, meaning you can traverse from a category to its parent, children, or products with single GraphQL queries that resolve exactly the fields your frontend needs. This connection-based model is particularly powerful for building breadcrumb navigation, category trees, and dynamic menu systems without over-fetching data.

Products in Saleor can belong to multiple categories through the product-category relationship, enabling cross-categorization strategies that improve product discoverability. When a customer browses "Summer Dresses" and "Sale Items," they can find the same product in both categories without data duplication. Saleor's GraphQL API handles these many-to-many relationships efficiently, and our categorization API can provide both primary and secondary category recommendations to take full advantage of this flexibility.

Common Saleor Category Verticals

Saleor's category system integrates with the platform's channel architecture, allowing different category visibility and product availability across sales channels. A single Saleor installation can power multiple storefronts with different category structures, making accurate initial categorization essential for maintaining consistency across your headless commerce ecosystem while enabling channel-specific product merchandising strategies.

API Integration Guide

Integrating our categorization API with your Saleor implementation is straightforward. Call our REST endpoint to get category predictions, then use Saleor's GraphQL mutations to assign categories to products. This workflow integrates naturally with existing Saleor product management scripts and CI/CD pipelines.

import requests

def categorize_for_saleor(product_description, api_key):
    base_url = "https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php"
    params = {
        "query": product_description,
        "api_key": api_key,
        "data_type": "saleor"
    }
    response = requests.get(base_url, params=params)
    return response.json()

# Example usage for headless commerce products
result = categorize_for_saleor(
    "Organic Cotton Oversized T-Shirt Unisex Sand Color",
    "your_api_key_here"
)
print(f"Category: {result['category']}")

async function categorizeForSaleor(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: 'saleor'
    });
    const response = await fetch(`${baseUrl}?${params}`);
    return response.json();
}

// Example usage for Next.js storefront
categorizeForSaleor('Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds with Active Noise Cancellation', '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=Handcrafted Ceramic Coffee Mug 350ml Minimalist Design" \
  -d "api_key=your_api_key_here" \
  -d "data_type=saleor"