Retail / E-commerce platform
Shopify: Improving the product taxonomy
- Company
- Shopify
- Country
- Canada
- Adoption stage
- Limited operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Shopify's product taxonomy consists of more than 10,000 categories and more than 2,000 attributes. It has to be revised every time new product types, technology categories or seasonal trends appear, and manual curation could not keep pace. It was also hard for the taxonomy team to hold expertise in every field merchants sell in. As the taxonomy grew, similar concepts were expressed differently across categories and naming conventions drifted apart.
Technology and data
Shopify attached several AI agents that revise the taxonomy itself. A structural analysis agent looks only at the taxonomy and finds gaps in the hierarchy and inconsistencies in naming rules. A product based analysis agent reads real merchant data and finds attributes missing from product titles, descriptions and merchant-assigned categories. A synthesis stage sorts out conflicts and duplication between the two results, and an equivalence detection agent finds cases where different categories point to the same set of products. Finally, domain AI reviewers evaluate and filter the proposals before passing them to human review.
Results
Shopify said that where a taxonomy specialist could look at a few categories a day, this system examines up to hundreds of categories at once. In mobile phone accessories the product analysis agent found that merchants often highlight MagSafe support and proposed a MagSafe compatible boolean attribute, which the electronics reviewer approved with 93 percent confidence. The company explained that it applied this approach to the Telephony area of the taxonomy as a proof of concept compared against the existing manual expansion method.
Limits and open questions
The source does not give numbers for how many taxonomy changes this system actually landed, or for the effect on merchants.
Sources
- How AI Agents are Evolving Shopify's Product Taxonomy at Scale (2025) - Shopifyshopify.engineering, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.