# Categorizing Products at Scale

DevFeed: [Categorizing Products at Scale](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/categorizing-products-at-scale-1342.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://shopify.engineering/categorizing-products-at-scale>)

Author: Jeet Mehta

Published: 2020-04-30T20:02:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Shopify Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/shopify-engineering.md>), [Shopify Engineering - Shopify Engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/shopify-engineering-shopify-engineering.md>)

Topics: [Shopify](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/shopify.md>), [Google](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/google.md>), [cross-platform](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cross-platform.md>)

Tags: [google](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/google.md>), [marketing](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/marketing.md>), [model](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/model.md>), [platform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform.md>), [products](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/products.md>), [scale](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/scale.md>), [shopify](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/shopify.md>), [technical](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical.md>)

## AI overview

Shopify describes how it built a product categorization engine to classify more than a billion products against Google Product Taxonomy, which contains over 5,000 hierarchical categories. The system supports personalized business insights, marketing recommendations, channel-related information, Shopify POS use cases, and market segmentation across more than 20 teams. The article also discusses the scale, structure, challenges, and technical tradeoffs of the approach.

## Source excerpt

By: Jeet Mehta and Kathy Ge With over 1M business owners now on Shopify, there are billions of products being created and sold across the platform. Just like those business owners, the products that they sell are extremely diverse! Even when selling similar products, they tend to describe products very differently.