Behind every online shopping experience, or every PIM or product catalogue – every time a customer easily filters for what they want and finds the perfect item – is a mountain of structured data.
For any large retailer or brand, the product catalog is a living, breathing thing. It expands with new seasons, shifts with new suppliers, and demands constant attention. While your team focuses on compelling marketing copy and beautiful imagery, there’s an invisible scaffolding holding it all together: product categorisation.
Get it right, your team and customers can navigate your products with ease. Get it wrong, and your products become invisible, lost in a sea of irrelevant results or rejected by major retail partners.
What is GS1?
If you’ve ever scanned a barcode, you’ve used a GS1 standard. GS1 is the global organisation that creates a universal language for commerce, ensuring products are identified and tracked consistently around the world.
In eCommerce, this goes far beyond the barcode. GS1 provides the Global Product Classification (GPC), a system that acts like a universal library for every product imaginable. It ensures that a “blender” from one supplier is understood as a “blender” in a retailer’s system, which is then understood as a “blender” by a marketplace. This standard is the key to seamless data exchange and is non-negotiable for operating at enterprise scale.
The Necessary Evil of Manual Categorisation
So, GS1 is essential. But why is it such a challenge?
The GS1 system is built on a strict, four-level hierarchy: Segment -> Family -> Class -> Brick. To list a simple product like “Clover Milk 2L”, you have to find its precise home:
- Segment: Food/Beverage
- Family: Milk/Butter/Cream/Yogurts/Cheese/Eggs/Substitutes
- Class: Milk/Milk Substitutes
- Brick: Milk (Perishable) – ID: 10000025
Now, imagine doing that for a product catalogue with 5,000+ SKUs, many of which are far more complex than milk. The GS1 database has thousands of “Brick” codes, and finding the exact right one is tough. Some of our customers don’t even go down to the Brick level because it can be so tedious.
For most enterprises, this means teams of people staring at spreadsheets or clicking through the vast GPC Browser tool, product by product. It’s a process that is not only slow but also incredibly prone to human error.
The Solution: Automated GS1 Categorisation
We saw this challenge holding back some of the world’s leading brands and retailers we work with, and we knew there had to be a better way. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the latest operation in the Productify.ai suite: GS1 Categorisation.
We built our GS1 categoriser from the ground up, purpose-built for the complexities of eCommerce. It’s not a generic AI model trying to guess. It’s an expert system trained on real product data.
Here’s how simple it is: Using our API, you provide a product name and/or description. In seconds, our AI returns the accurate, four-level GS1 classification, right down to the specific Brick code. Or use Productify.ai website’s Excel import to bulk classify.
Available as well through Productify.ai’s Zapier and Make.com no-code integrations.
No more guesswork. Just speed, accuracy, and consistency across your entire catalogue.
It’s Part of a Proven Platform
We know that enterprises move carefully, especially when it comes to adopting new technology. That’s why GS1 Categorisation isn’t a standalone function; it’s a powerful new capability within our proven, one-stop AI platform that eCommerce enterprises already trust.
Productify.ai is designed to integrate seamlessly into the workflows you already have. Our clients use our API to build AI operations directly into their PIMs and internal systems.
Imagine your workflow for launching a new product line:
- First, you use our Nutritional Table Digitisation to automatically extract data from the packaging.
- Next, you generate a unique, on-brand Marketing Description and a snappy Headline.
- Because you sell through multiple retailers who don’t want duplicate content, you use our Rephrase operation to create distinct versions for each channel.
- And now, with an API call, you use GS1 Categorisation to instantly assign the correct code before the product data is saved to your PIM.
From Tedious Task to Strategic Advantage
With Productify.ai’s automated GS1 Categorisation, you can transform this bottleneck into a strategic advantage. Free up your team from the drudgery of data classification so they can focus on what they do best: merchandising, marketing, and growing your business.
Ready to put an end to the manual grind? Schedule a personalized demo to see our GS1 Categoriser and the full Productify.ai platform in action.
