[bazaar] categories

[gr8Mu1]

Goal: find a good conceptual solution to deal with categories, and then implement it accordingly:

• If you think about the things a store offers you obviously cannot put them all into one and the same category, so businesses at least should have a list of categories
• Furthermore there are questions about the granularity/generality of the categories
• Also sometimes it is hard to decide which category a certain offering should belong to (does it have to be just one?)
• There are questions about having a extendable set of categories vs. a fixed predefined one. Can a user define a new category?

[gr8Mu1]

After thinking about all these issues I'd suggest a slightly different point of view:

• Rather than hierarchical (or not hierarchical) categories I'd think of associated keywords, i.e. typically several "associated keywords" per offering, actually what comes to mind when you think of your offering and about using it. (keywords describing: what it is basically: (cloths, shoes, tool, vehicle etc.), typical associated activity/purpose (sport, DIY, cleaning, cooking, playing, gaming, learning, being creative, building), associated location (outdoors, living room, kitchen,...), )
• I've looked at coop, migros, galaxus among others before and tried to find certain products via their categories and found it sometimes hard to "guess" the single category and the "correct" category the product was in. Sometimes it's just not as clear.
• I'd suggest to have a predefined set of categories (otherwise the set of categories could grow quickly and wildly (misspellings etc.)) a user can still include a "custom category" as part of the text in the offering's description section. (Nevertheless it is conceivable that an admin might every other year or so extend the set of available predefined categories, e.g. if many users use a certain term in the description section of their offerings)
• A further consideration regarding UX: While searching it might make sense to also being able to exclude a keyword (clicking the keyword button toggles between 3 states (green thumbs up: yes, red thumbs down: no, gray: not selected/don't care))
• not too many enum values, rather general terms.

[brenzi]

can you make a suggestion of a small set of predefined categories?
I think the better the search function, the less need for well-tuned categories

[gr8Mu1]

• {food, cloths, furniture, tool, device, vehicle, electronics, software, service, finance, commodity, outdoors, livingRoom, kitchen, workshop, garage, bedroom, bathroom, cooking, cleaning, grooming, playing, learning, gaming, sport, leisure, spring, summer, autumn, winter, forWomen, forMen, forChildren, forAnimals}

• these are around 30, maybe already too many...

[gr8Mu1]

Also I suggest to look at it more from the perspective of "associated keywords" than of a tree of categories...

[brenzi]

I like the associated keywords approach. and please narrow down categories for starters:

{food, drink, clothing, art, furniture, vehicle, electronics, service, learning, gaming, sport, leisure, other}

but that's only categories for offerings, right? We need categories for businesses too

{restaurant, bar, groceries, fashion, service, artist, ...., other}

[brenzi]

as discussed: use one set of categories for businesses and offerings alike: {food, drink, clothing, art, furniture, vehicle, electronics, service, learning, gaming, sport, leisure, other}