Departments, Categories, and Tags

Departments are the highest classification of your auction-house items. Departments  

differ from auction-house to auction-house depending on segments of business (for example: jewelry, books, art, etc.). For the most part, customers will only receive recommended items from Departments they registered to or bid in.

​​Categories are sub-departments to which items are assigned based on similarity, or a defined criteria (for example within the Art department you can identify categories such as Contemporary Art, Asian Art, Modern Art etc.). Categories also influence recommendations.

Both Departments and Categories can be used in email targeting.

Tags are words or phrases that describe your items and/or your customers' preferences. They appear on both Item pages and Customer Profiles.

Tags are one of the tools that we use to match an item to its potential buyer. They can be an author's name, an item type (a book, a manuscript, a letter, etc.), a period (post war, specific year, WW1, etc.), and so on. 

These are the tags our algorithm extracts from your items' descriptions using NLP (Natural Language Processing) tools. They appear in gray.

Active tags are stronger tags, which means that they describe an item or the customer better. For example, the system usually takes the artist's name as an active tag. These tags appear in color, above the Optional Tags.

If a customer and an item have a similar tag, then the customer is more likely to receive that item over one that doesn't have a match.

You can manually strengthen an Optional Tag into an Active Tag by simply clicking on the "+" sign next to an Optional Tag. When you add a new tag by typing it in the bar, it will automatically become an Active Tag. To demote it to an Optional Tag, press the 'x' on the left of the tag.
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Starred Tags are even stronger than Active Tags.

For example, if you know that you have a customer that only collects items related to Albert Einstein, you should make the tag "Albert Einstein" a starred tag. Do this by simply clicking on the star sign next to the tag. However, please note that with starred tags, you are basically telling our system "I know better than you; ONLY offer this customer items related to Albert Einstein". So if you aren't sure, don't star a tag!

You shouldn't generally need to edit tags on items or customers - the system should do the work for you!

You should use tags to address specific customer considerations - for example, if you speak with a customer who tells you he's finished collecting a certain artist, simply remove the tag for this artist in his Customer Profile.

Likewise, if you're speaking to a new customer or one who is interested in something he never bid on before, add tag(s) to his profile to reflect his most up-to-date interests and generate better personalized recommendations.