How to Categorize Products for Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Understanding Salesforce Commerce Cloud Product Categorization

Salesforce Commerce Cloud represents one of the most sophisticated enterprise e-commerce platforms available today, powering digital storefronts for some of the world's largest brands and retailers. Product categorization within this ecosystem requires a deep understanding of the platform's unique catalog management capabilities, including its hierarchical category structures, attribute sets, and integration with Salesforce's broader Customer 360 platform. Our AI-powered categorization API enables enterprise merchants to automatically classify products with exceptional precision, reducing manual effort and ensuring consistent taxonomy application across B2B, B2C, and D2C commerce implementations.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform, formerly known as Demandware, has evolved into a comprehensive unified commerce solution that handles everything from product information management to order orchestration across multiple channels. Central to the platform's effectiveness is its robust catalog management system, which organizes products into hierarchical categories that customers can navigate when browsing your storefront. Each category in Salesforce Commerce Cloud can contain subcategories, creating a tree structure that mirrors how customers naturally think about product organization. For example, an apparel retailer might structure categories as Clothing > Women's > Dresses > Casual Dresses, allowing customers to progressively narrow their search through intuitive navigation paths.

The challenge for enterprise merchants lies in maintaining consistent categorization across potentially millions of SKUs while accommodating the platform's sophisticated features like product sets, bundles, variation groups, and master-variant relationships. Salesforce Commerce Cloud's Business Manager interface provides powerful tools for category management, but manual categorization at scale remains time-consuming and error-prone. This is where AI-powered categorization transforms operations, enabling merchants to automatically assign products to the most appropriate categories based on product titles, descriptions, attributes, and other metadata, while respecting the specific taxonomy structures defined within their Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation.

Our enterprise categorization API integrates seamlessly with Salesforce Commerce Cloud through the Open Commerce API (OCAPI) and the newer Shopper APIs, enabling real-time product classification during catalog import processes, PIM synchronization, or on-demand categorization requests. The system learns your specific category structure and naming conventions, ensuring predictions align with your established taxonomy rather than generic category suggestions. This contextual awareness is crucial for enterprise implementations where category structures often reflect complex business logic, merchandising strategies, and regional variations across multiple storefronts within the same Salesforce Commerce Cloud instance.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Catalog Architecture

Salesforce Commerce Cloud employs a sophisticated catalog architecture that supports complex product relationships and flexible category assignments. Understanding this architecture is essential for effective AI-powered categorization that respects the platform's data model and business rules. The platform supports multiple catalog types including master catalogs, site catalogs, and storefront catalogs, each serving different purposes in the product information hierarchy and requiring careful categorization strategies.

At the core of Salesforce Commerce Cloud's product organization is the concept of category assignment, where products can belong to multiple categories simultaneously through primary and secondary category assignments. The primary category determines the product's main navigation path and is used for breadcrumb generation, while secondary categories provide additional discovery paths without affecting the canonical URL structure. This multi-category capability is particularly valuable for products that naturally span multiple taxonomic classifications, such as a wireless keyboard that could reasonably appear in both Electronics > Computer Accessories and Office > Desk Accessories categories.

Our AI categorization system accounts for this multi-assignment capability by providing ranked category predictions with confidence scores, enabling automated primary category assignment while suggesting secondary categories that could increase product discoverability. The system also respects Salesforce Commerce Cloud's category inheritance rules, where products automatically inherit searchable attributes and sorting rules from their parent categories, making accurate top-level categorization crucial for proper product behavior throughout the storefront.

Common Enterprise Category Structures

Salesforce Commerce Cloud's flexibility allows enterprises to define custom category structures that align with their specific merchandising strategies and customer expectations. Our AI models are trained to recognize and adapt to custom taxonomies, learning from your existing categorized products to provide predictions that match your established organizational patterns rather than imposing generic category structures.

API Integration Guide

Integrating our product categorization API with your Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation is straightforward and can be accomplished through several architectural patterns. Whether you're building a custom cartridge, implementing a headless commerce solution, or integrating through middleware like MuleSoft or Salesforce Integration Cloud, our RESTful API endpoints provide consistent, reliable categorization services that respect your SFCC taxonomy structure.

import requests

def categorize_for_sfcc(product_data, api_key):
    """
    Categorize a product for Salesforce Commerce Cloud
    Returns primary and secondary category suggestions
    """
    base_url = "https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php"

    # Combine product attributes for better categorization
    query = f"{product_data['name']} {product_data.get('description', '')} {product_data.get('brand', '')}"

    params = {
        "query": query,
        "api_key": api_key,
        "data_type": "salesforce_commerce"
    }

    response = requests.get(base_url, params=params)
    result = response.json()

    # Map to SFCC category format
    return {
        "primary_category": result['category'],
        "category_path": result.get('category_path', []),
        "confidence": result.get('confidence', 0.95)
    }

# Example usage with SFCC product data
product = {
    "name": "Premium Wireless Bluetooth Headphones",
    "description": "Active noise cancellation, 30-hour battery life",
    "brand": "TechAudio Pro"
}

result = categorize_for_sfcc(product, "your_api_key_here")
print(f"Primary Category: {result['primary_category']}")

// SFCC Controller Script for Product Categorization
'use strict';

var server = require('server');
var HTTPClient = require('dw/net/HTTPClient');
var Site = require('dw/system/Site');

function categorizeProduct(product) {
    var apiKey = Site.current.getCustomPreferenceValue('categorizationAPIKey');
    var baseUrl = 'https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php';

    var httpClient = new HTTPClient();
    httpClient.open('GET', baseUrl +
        '?query=' + encodeURIComponent(product.name + ' ' + product.shortDescription) +
        '&api_key=' + apiKey +
        '&data_type=salesforce_commerce'
    );
    httpClient.send();

    if (httpClient.statusCode === 200) {
        var response = JSON.parse(httpClient.text);
        return {
            categoryId: response.category_id,
            categoryPath: response.category,
            confidence: response.confidence
        };
    }
    return null;
}

module.exports.CategorizeProduct = categorizeProduct;

curl -X GET "https://www.productcategorization.com/api/ecommerce/ecommerce_category6_get.php" \
  -d "query=Nike Air Max 270 React Running Shoes Men's Athletic Footwear" \
  -d "api_key=your_api_key_here" \
  -d "data_type=salesforce_commerce"