QuickCat

QuickCat is an app built on Shopify, a platform used by over 1.7M merchants to run their online stores. The goal is to help merchants save time and increase sales by organizing their online product listing with the help of a global human workforce.

Product categorization is both critical and challenging for the e-commerce industry, especially if you handle a wide variety and large volume of products. Some of the benefits of an effective implementation of product categorization include:

🛒 Enhancing the shopping experience
Product categorization is one of the most crucial factors to ensure a good UX, since it enables the consumer to narrow down their choice with the least number of clicks, while having the widest range of relevant products to choose from, based on their search keyword.
🔍 Better SEO
A well-organized inventory has a significant impact on a store's SEO ranking. It leads shoppers to know where to find what they are looking for and makes it easy for both people browsing on the store website and people searching on Google or other search engines to find the product.
📙 Improving suggestions and personalized recommendations
According to Shopify, their product recommendation algorithm relies on product categorization to help customers discover related products. Product categorization also enables powerful cross-selling and upselling strategies.
📈 Increased sales
Product categorization naturally leads to higher sales. When a customer can easily find what they are searching for and can navigate through the site easily, it’s more likely that there will be potential conversion.

What it does

Trying to handle product categorization internally can be a massive drag on your resources, and while many centralized platforms that already provide product categorization outsourcing like Clickworker, Crowdsource, and MTurk, the process is cumbersome, expensive and requires a lot of manual work to review and import the results to online stores.

That's why I created a Shopify app that connects to stores, sends their inventory and available categories directly to the workers, and allows merchants to instantly apply the suggested changes without having to deal with spreadsheets or CSV files.

Another huge advantage is that I relied on the Effect Network, a decentralized crowdsourcing platform that has over 10k workers globally. Which enables me to process tons of products quickly, accurately and inexpensively.

Challenges we ran into

The blockchain part was pretty intimidating at first since I had no experience with it, but I quickly realized that Effect has its own SDK and it abstracts away interacting with the blockchain entirely, which made it a lot easier for me to quickly iterate and develop my app.

Another challenge was charging merchants, the initial plan was to allow merchants to connect their wallets and pay workers directly, but I later decided to use my own wallet and Shopify's billing API for many reasons:

Shopify's ToS requires payments to be made via their app billing API.
It's much easier for merchants who aren't familiar with the technology.
It allows me to charge extra to help run the servers and develop new features.
It's also totally valid and allowed according to Laurens!

What's next for QuickCat

Publish the app on the Shopify App Store and make it available to the 1.7M merchants relying on the Shopify ecosystem.
Work with the Effect team to deploy the campaign on the mainnet.
Allow merchants to have control over the categories available to workers. Currently, workers can select from all the categories in the store.
Improve the quality of the submissions by adding another validation campaign, and making it an optional feature at an additional cost for merchants.