Opentaps Analytics Ranking Product Categories

With your sale data, opentaps Analytics can help you rank a list of products and present the best sellers to your customers first.

But what is a best seller? This is not as simple as it may first sound. Should you show your customers the products which have sold the most units, or the products that have higher prices but may sell less frequently? What if a product is new or hasn't sold too many times, but its brand sells much better than the other brands you carry? Finally, should you show a product by itself or a category of products first?

opentaps Analytics takes into consideration several factors when ranking your product category's members, including:

• Value of sales
• Units sold
• Sales of the brand
• Newness of the products

So, it could help you balance showing high value/low volume versus low value/high volume products. In the event several products have similar sales (or no sales), it could help you prioritize based on better-selling brands. Finally, it'll push the newest products in your category higher. All these factors are controlled by parameters which you can use to adjust the relative weights or rankings of each one.

To rank your product category, call the API at URL

http://analytics.opentaps.com/analytics/control/productCategoriesRank?userlogin=your_user_name&password=your_password&webkey=your_webkey

with a JSON string in this format:

{
   "categories":[
      {
         "id":"CATEGORY1",
         "introductionDate":"2012-03-15T21:52:10",
         "products":[
            {
               "id":"PRODUCT1001",
               "introductionDate":"2012-03-15T21:56:09"
            }
         ]
      },
      {
         "id":"CATEGORY2",
         "introductionDate":"2012-02-23T01:47:10",
         "products":[
            {
               "id":"CATEGORY2001",
               "introductionDate":"2012-02-10T19:49:14"
            },
            {
               "id":"CATEGORY2002",
               "introductionDate":"2012-02-10T19:49:16"
            }
         ]
      }
   ],
   "products":[
      {
         "id":"PRODUCT3001",
         "introductionDate":"2007-08-09T21:19:28"
      },
      {
         "id":"PRODUCT3002",
         "introductionDate":"2007-08-09T21:19:28"
      }
   ],
   "dateFrom":"2013-01-01T00:00:00",
   "dateTo":"2013-12-31T00:00:00",
   "brandBoostFactor":"1.00",
   "newnessBoostFactor":"1.00",
   "quantityBoostFactor":"2.00"
}

Note that you are passing both a list of products and a list of categories, plus your parameters. opentaps Analytics will look through your categories and sum up the sales of the products within those categories.

The response will be a JSON string with each of the products and categories which are members of your original category and the ranking score from opentaps Analytics:

{
   "categories":{
      "CATEGORY1":4.227991,
      "CATEGORY2":1.712083,
   },
   "products":{
      "PRODUCT3001":24.52276,
      "PRODUCT3002":24.52276
   }
}

The products or categories with higher rankings should be shown first to your customers.